Hilal Isler

Honey

I keep the tabs open, my little doorways of possibility. It’s a Tuesday here, but who cares? Certainly not anyone in this apartment, where all three of us are unemployed. 

I’ve fallen asleep once again to the hum and heat of my laptop warming the mattress beside me, radiating my ovaries. On the floor sits a tower of books I’ve already read. I can hear the kettle squealing in the kitchen. Why won’t my grandfather take it off the burner? Why won’t he ask my noni to do it?

I swing my feet over the side of the single bed. My laptop slides off, too. A clatter. When I pick it up, I can see I’ve timed out of my library account. 

I toss the open computer onto the bed where it lands bottom-up, like an upset toddler, head buried in the duvet. My grandfather has turned on the state radio station. Traffic on Palmiye Sokak is congested, the lady whines. A heat advisory is in effect once again. I pad down the hall to the toilet. It’s only upon wiping that I realize I’ve gotten my period. 

The walls are too thin in this flat. It can’t be good for my mental state to hear my grandparents having loud geriatric sex each night. “Oh, my LION!” “Don’t stop TIGRESS!” etcetera and so on. It’s difficult to fall asleep, let alone to look them in the eye at the breakfast table in the morning. “HELLO, HELLO!” My grandfather shouts at me, cheerfully. He’s wearing a half-apron. “SLEEP ALRIGHT?” 

“WHAT ARE YOU COOKING,” I yell back. I can see his hearing aids aren’t in yet. It’s French Toast. They call it yumurtalı ekmek. Eggy bread. Simple, to the point: the Turkish people, the Turkish language. I’m still learning. I’m improving every day. I’ve been here, living with the two of them, for six years. I arrived three days after my fourteenth birthday: my clothes still smelling of smoke, the headlines red and urgent, burning forests as backdrop; a one-way plane ticket from LAX, an entire Universe removed. My next of kin.

One slice or two, my grandfather wants to know. “THESE EGGS ARE VILLAGE EGGS,” he shouts. A point of pride. He buys everything from the village: goat cheese, parsley, tomatoes on the vine. He buys and he cooks, and Tigress does the washing up. So it is. My sixth year living with them, and this is how it has always been. 

“Eat before it gets cold,” Grandma says now. “Eat it with the honey Müge gave us.” She doesn’t have to say the rest. I can hear it anyway. Müge, her childhood friend. Müge, the friend who managed to leave this town for the bright lights of Istanbul. People still recognize her on the street: Müge Seçkin, the Turkish Meryl Streep. Even their initials are the same, my grandmother likes to say, over and again; a comment so stale by now to everyone but her. 

I take a slice of French toast onto my plate, drizzle Müge’s honey: back and forth, up and down. A thick amber latticework. In her faded house dress, my grandmother has started washing the dishes, coaxing egg off the pan. Her small feet are bare against the tiles. The sun blazes in through the window above the sink, the sky a bright bonnet of blue. She dries her soapy hands on a tea towel and turns to face me suddenly, as if she knows I’ve been watching. She grins, winking, and for a moment, I can see the ghost of who she once was rolling through her: her sharp little chin; twin batons of fire twirling in her eyes; how she used to spin me around inside this kitchen, how I would dance in socked feet, growing dizzy, breathless; how our laughter would rocket off the walls.

We wrote stories together in those days. Once upon a time it happened. Happily ever after they lived. She likes to remind me of those summers we visited. She likes to pretend I am still that little girl, inside. Always look at what’s before you with childlike wonder, she says to me. Try not to turn back. 

My grandfather releases the propped screen door of the balcony with a sudden, loud snap and it startles my grandmother. She shakes her head, and rolls her eyes. “This man and his doors,” she says, and I understand exactly what she means.

From my bedroom, I retrieve my computer, cradling it carefully against my lap. The sun bakes my skin. The laptop grows hot on my thighs. 

My grandfather thinks I shouldn’t write stories about our dying world, but ones western people have come to expect from Turkish writers. “Honor killings,” he advises. “The veil. Talk about Ramadan.”

My grandmother agrees. “You should use the word Baba as much as possible,” she says.

In my room, I close each tab, one by one. Whale carcasses floating around Rottnest Island. The Great Pacific Garbage tyre. The ghostly ivory-billed woodpecker, now extinct. The drought and wildfires in California ongoing, forever going. The phone rings. It’s Müge. My grandmother’s voice filters in from the next room. I can hear her laugh. I can hear her saying something about the honey, telling her friend how sweet its taste. 

Hilal Isler is a Turkish American writer based in the Twin Cities. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Brooklyn Review, the LA Review of Books online, and is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly. She’s a staff reader for Ploughshares, and is founding editor of the Hennepin Review, a literary arts journal devoted to the work of women and non-binary creatives of color.

Read more about Hilal and her work at hilalisler.com
Follow Hilal on Twitter @HilalIsler