A Stranger at the Market
Ezgi Üstündağ
The chaos must have begun several minutes before Leyla emerged from Gözde Şarküteri, her bags loaded with beyaz peynir, kaymak, and honey. It wasn’t the ordinary ruckus of the Kadıköy market; a crowd had gathered in the alleyway outside and had managed to completely obstruct her favorite fruit stand. An inhuman snarl, followed by very human shrieks, drew her closer.
It took some pushing to get through the hot, anxious bodies of her fellow shoppers. A few men warned her that it wasn’t for a woman to see. Some older women pushed past her, walking in the opposite direction to take advantage of the relative emptiness of other parts of the çarşı.
She first saw it through the legs of a taller gentleman and caught subsequent glances over the shoulders of observers smaller than her. There were sirens in the distance, although they wailed long enough that Leyla couldn’t be sure whether they were meant to address the incident unfolding in front of her or a different crisis in this ocean of people and concrete.
And how would they treat it should an ambulance reach this corner of the market? With its feline snout and eyes, feathered torso, and scaly legs, it most certainly wasn’t human. It growled and thrashed its arms, which ended in pointed talons jutting from hands matching the texture of its legs. It had been shot twice, once in each leg, and so rendered immobile. Leyla assumed it moved like any other biped.
A human man stood over it, his handgun still aimed at the stranger in case it decided to rise from the blood-soaked pavement. “I’ll shoot you in the head, you şeytan! Don’t think I won’t dump you back into the godless place that made you!” This was the hero, according to the young man standing near Leyla. The tea shop owner had grabbed the handgun hidden under his counter when he saw the stranger stumbling through the alley just outside his stand.
“Was it attacking people?” Leyla asked the young man.
He seemed surprised that she would care what the stranger was doing before it was injured. “Look at it. Does it matter? Would you have done something differently?”
The canvas bags grew heavy and painful in her arms. She dropped one near the young man’s foot. “Sister, you should go. This is no place for a woman.”
“It came out of the Bosphorus!” cried another bystander. Evidently, the exclamation was meant for the two police officers who had just made their way through the crowd to the crime scene. They approached the shooter and spoke with him in a hushed tone, far too softly for Leyla to make out what they were saying. The stranger could no longer snarl and growl. It quivered, in pain or fear, as the police walked around it with the same urgency they would treat a dead kitten.
“Take it away from here!” yelled another new voice from the crowd.
One of the officers patted the shooter on the shoulder and seemed to instruct him to wait in his shop for further instructions. The grateful teşekkürler on the cop’s lips was impossible to misread. For the other officer, it was an opportunity to kick the stranger, violence motivated just as much by curiosity as a more straight-forward desire to cause pain. As he pulled his foot back to deliver a second, harder blow, the stranger screeched and burst into flames. The fire was out in an instant, even before it could leap from the stranger to the attacking officer’s pant legs.
The air smelled like smoke and sea salt. A few feathers drifted above the now-dried pool of blood. Gulls were quickly on the scene. Leyla, not entirely sure why she was crying, pushed her way out of the crowd before the police ordered the rest of the bystanders out of the alley.
*
Ezgi Üstündağ was born in upstate New York and grew up in Ames, Iowa. Her short fiction has appeared in both English- and Turkish-language publications, including Flash Fiction Magazine, The Eastern Iowa Review, YKY Kitap-lık, and others. She is also the author of a novella, Mother Tongue (Urban Farmhouse Press)