July 2023 | fiction
She was flying in her dream, flying through the sacred sky, when she tumbled through the clouds and landed in a heap of rubble upon the earth. Then she knew she was no longer dreaming because someone trampled on top of her trying to get somewhere else. She tried to move, but her legs were pinned down, her foot twisted in a hideous manner on the other side of a slab. Thunder clapped inside her head. She tried to call out, but her mouth was gasping on the stones next to her and beside that lay her tiny, battered heart shining in the moon’s light. Suddenly it struck her: she was dead. She could see pieces of herself all about.
Yet instead of being horrified by this, she felt a surprising warmth inside. She was flowing. Not down the dusty road and towards the sea, but up towards the heavens where her dream had been. In that very moment she was turning into light, her spirit expanding. She had risen and others had risen too, all of them ascending, weightless. They had begun again.
The village lay scattered far below, the people who had survived were shouting and throwing their hands wildly about, everyone looking for all the things they’d ever loved that had been taken away. She could not see this or even hear it, but she sensed it. All things came back to what they were.
It was market day, but she would never be going again with her mother and sister to buy the apricots and figs or the fresh anchovies from the smiling fishmonger. She would never sip sweet boza sprinkled with bits of shaved cinnamon bark or chase her sister through the silvern almond grove. La-le! La-le! – she could hear someone calling, the syllables of her name hanging crystalline in the icy air.
And it had all happened because of that evening years ago when the contractors had made their hidden agreement: more sand than cement. Who would even know? They exchanged incredulous looks as they imagined a new car, gold watches, trips to the resort by the sea. What was so wrong with wanting such things? What would ever happen? Nothing, not for a thousand years.
For the children of Turkey.
Donna Obeid
Donna Obeid’s work appears most recently in The Baltimore Review, Carve, Flash Fiction Magazine, Hawai`i Pacific Review, South 85 Journal, and Waterwheel Review; she was a finalist for the Julia Peterkin Literary Award and Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Palo Alto, California. Read more at: www.donnaobeid.com.
July 2023 | visual art
Reflections
Terry a. O’Neal
Terry a. O’Neal is an American writer and photographer. O’Neal was named one of the century’s great Black women writers in a book entitled Literary Divas: The Top 100+ Most Admired African-American Women Writers in Literature.
July 2023 | nonfiction
Before I wrote color essays for an arts magazine, I was curator of a gallery. Before I became a curator, I was moving 3000 miles across the United States. Before the 3000 miles, I was meditating six hours a day in the snow. Before the stillness and cold, I was a marriage counselor causing many a divorce. Truth telling breaks up static. Before the truth, I gave shiatsu massages where I had to do pushups with my thumbs to keep them strong. Before weak thumbs, I memorized Shakespeare while training my voice to project on stage without a mike by repeating daily manalathavaza and other voice exercises, using a bone prop propped between my lips to keep vowels open and consonants sharp. Before those three years, I modeled flannel nightgowns in NYC and waited on tables, and before that flunked junior year of high school but managed to fake my way to graduate on time. Before that I was stuck in the middle of three brothers in the middle of the United States. And then I was born. In between all this, I hitchhiked for two years through the Middle East.
Hitchhiking on trucks, sitting in smoke-drenched cafes with only men, following a stranger to a dark hallway in Aleppo to change money for a better exchange rate, riding through Damascus in a beat-up Fiat instructed to remain silent lest the government hear us while 16-year-old boys with machine guns guard the streets– it’s impossible to know what my boundaries are. How much to assert myself. How much to speak. It’s difficult to know what is cultural and how much is individual bias. I drink four tiny cups of Turkish coffee with a Bedouin family and it is one too many; tradition deeming three as hospitable and four you’ve outstayed your welcome. Being a woman I tend towards remaining quiet and later question whether I should have spoken up. Invited to dinner ends up sitting on the floor with eight men, eating with our fingers while a woman’s hand keeps passing plates of food through a curtain. One of the men says, while casting sidelong smirks my way, “Women change with the moon or rather the moon changes women and money changes the man.”
I write this on a table of weathered wood, the turquoise paint peeling into the knot beneath my notebook. My past settles behind me and the future is now. My heart expands and my forehead softens and the sea is turquoise beyond the blond sand. Through the open window the sun lies gentle on my face. I don’t want religion. I want to experiment with other realities, but not with drugs. It must be possible.
If society is narrow then I must be wider. The world is in me. I am the world. A colorful shawl, some warm tights, a pair of wool socks and I’m on my way. I move less as I move. It is a consideration of tasks.
Dian Parker
Dian Parker’s essays have been published in 3:AM Magazine, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Channel, Event, Burningword Literary, Westerly, Critical Read, After the Art, among others, and nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Her art writing is with Art & Object, Fine Books & Collections, Art & Antiques, Art New England, London Observer, and others.
