Melike Demir

Her Story

Bitter almond. That's what my mouth tastes of tonight — the lily stems I stripped before I set them into your father-in-law's wreath, sap gone tacky on my thumbs. I didn't wear gloves. I wanted something of this day under my nails. Fair skin doesn't hold up to a cenaze salonu's air, but I stood there twelve hours in the high-collar blouse, composed as iced ayran, and I pressed one stolen lily into your palm in the receiving line while your wife shook hands with an uncle. Nobody looked. Nobody ever looks at the florist's hands. Here's the thing the family never learned about me: I think clearest in rooms with the door shut. The compact storeroom behind the curtain at the community theater — seven square meters of paint pots and folding chairs, no window, one bulb that hums. I run the stage crew there Thursday nights and I've made myself comfortable in that little box more times than I'll say into a phone. Locked in, breath fogging the wig stand, brick dust on my tongue. That's not a metaphor or a perversion I'm apologizing for. Closeness is all I want, but it has to be somewhere the whole borough can't be watching. Which is exactly why the confessional gets me. Not the sacrament — the geometry. A slatted screen, a voice on the other side, everything said out loud and nothing witnessed. Hoca, forgive me. Hoca, again. I've got a low throaty voice made for that murmur and I know it. So. That lily, in your hand. Nobody can comment on a widow's brother's wife standing too near at a funeral — grief is the only license in this city still valid for that. I want us in the storeroom after the last car leaves. I want to lay down the way I lay a posy — a spiral bouquet in my grip, breath slowing to order — and then the inverse of my whole job, everything unwound, every bit of covering stripped off you. I'm not in the chapel, though. I'm in my shop, smelling of Oya's olive-oil börek, and I have got one thumb hooked in my collar. Sana bir şeyler hâlâ, sevgilim — my petal — smell it. That's my skin.