I liked looking at the poster because the lead actress and I shared a first name, and she had her hair cut close to the scalp like Mom, and I guess I have a weak spot for women with short hair, so I bought a ticket from the front booth and entered the first hall to the right to see the movie. In the half-dark of the hall I let my eyes flit across the screen to catch the subtitles: The cards can’t see you yet. The tarot will reveal more if you choose to show up. At the end of the row to my left stood a man. An old man. A man who looked like the older version of the man in the movie. Minus a mustache. Minus half his hair. Minus his unsalvageable youth. I imagined him coming here to see himself on the big screen after all those years. Forty years. Fifty years. And it would make him what today—eighty? ninety?—given that the movie came out, as the poster had it, in 1962, the year my mother was born. I turned my head back to screen and tried to watch the rest of the movie. The movie was about a young pop star who wandered the streets of Paris from five to seven, in the two hours that she had to kill before hearing from her doctor about the result of her biopsy. She was a nervous wreck, the kind I liked. Mom had given me a poor taste in men and a poorer taste in women. That was before she died of leukemia herself, severely lacking in healthy cells and happiness. She, too, liked to cut her hair short and walk around the house with nothing but a dotted white robe on. I knew she would like the man sitting at the end of the row if she were still alive. She would like his manners, she would like his bespoke tweed jacket. She would like his deadness on the outside. She and he would enjoy a cup of tea together, at the downstairs cafe of the movie theater. They would talk about the weather, they would talk about God. They would discuss what a fine year 1995 had been, the last happy time before I was born. They would kill time, she would kill me, and I would kill myself. Her eyes would turn to me and say: It’s okay. I’m okay. The cards can’t see me yet.
A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Vestal Review, Maudlin House, and American Literary Review, among other places. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50) and awarded a finalist status at various literary contests, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
Lost Balloon 