Smyrna
SARP SOZDINLER
A wildfire cracked through the sky in the early minutes of a new decade. A British recon flight’s tail had snapped off, undone by a fuel shortage, dooming the aircraft to a downward spiral. As the old metal disintegrated in midair, a pair of Soviet-made bombs escaped the body of the aircraft and found their way into the only circus traveling the countryside of Western Anatolia, each yielding a far greater power than that of a mushroom cloud but weighing less than the elephants it set free.
The bombs, mercifully, did not detonate.
The oldest of the elephants peeked its head out of the shellshocked cage, leading the way for others in the herd. The air smelled faintly of chemicals, a mixture of burnt flesh and steel. The sun was an invisible god behind thick plumes of smoke and a lick of hydrogen purple. One by one the animals stepped out of what had held them captive for all these years. What stretched outside of their cage had been but a fairy tale teeming with faceless sounds and funny fragrances, until today. Bombs, pink and fat like beached scallops, lay idly by their chained feet as the elephants filed out of the circus on a rampage.
By noon, the herd would leave behind nothing but a large cloud of dust and some squashed shells of dead plants. The leaves would gasp open before them as they wandered across the murky cover of mud riddled with debris and nameless bones. Unlike the ones in the circus, the trees in this part of the country were a bluster for fall, hinting at the kind of yellow that was entirely novel to all circus animals. Through an opening in the leaves the fiery lights of some houses emerged in the distance, twinkling back through the black guts of the woods like fireflies. The world became a saturated, shifting realm as the sun began its sweep across the sky.
Smyrna was in ruins by the time the herd reached the town’s welcome sign. They’d heard of the name from their captors many times before, this clump of syllables that would make no sense. Against the early evening breeze, the elephants stomped their colossal legs along the cobblestoned roads, each step a greater cause for seismic tremor than the bombs fallen on the city no longer than a week ago. Through the roofs sprouted a fiery veil of smoke, dimming the herd’s already limited visibility. Citizens stopped and gawked at the sight of these five bulky animals limping dreamily through the streets that the tanks swept just the day before. A dream could mean a plenty of things to people in this corner of the world, least of all an apparition of such biblical variety.
The voices grew louder as the herd marched past the safe zone. The signs of a battle dragging on for far too long were imposing the underlying tragedy on everything within their immediate surroundings. A platoon of young men on the other side of the fence shouted unintelligibly at the animals, cocking their guns out of not knowing what to do. The soldier with the bullet-holed helmet out front flailed the net in his hands in the same way the circus folk would after each night’s show. The smallest of elephants flapped its large ears in fear and toppled against the syrupy afternoon light; the others, bound in fate, joined their friend in outcry.
To the merriment of observers around, the animals broke free of their chains and stomped about in different directions, bruising a few body parts along the way. They were incapable of holding a grudge but the soldiers found no heed in holding one of the elephants captive; those who would survive made a run for their lives without looking back, heading toward anywhere but the city, toward anything but the people.
The elephants walked and walked under the darkening sky until time became one thing and they another. Past the deserted harbor, they stopped a few feet shy of one thing they feared most; the Aegean Sea ran red with the collective blood of all the people who fell martyr to a cause imposed upon them by not the bullets but by those who were supposed to protect them. A crocodile dwelled on the surface of the defiled water, yet another killing machine accomplice in the prevailing terror. The elephant in the back of the line skipped the herd from around the nearest palm tree that was stunted by not the Allied Forces but by forces of nature. The animal hooked its trunk into the water out of thirst and immediately pulled it back as if touched by lava. The rest of the herd rolled back in unison and shrieked as loudly as they could, the fear of an invisible menace running free through their throats.
The water swallowed the elephant whole before anyone could do anything, including the crocodile.
Nightfall dimmed the caliber of violence by turning everything that was red to black. Nature, in the midst of it, was a whetted being, blacker than the blackest beast. The elephants stood still for the first time since the morning and watched the flames hundreds of feet high setting the wintry night alight. With the last of the bombs, they instinctually turned around and started their way toward where they knew best all along. The distant sounds of gunfire gained a dark gravity and dubbed their steps across the bombarded land stretching out between them and their demolished cage. All day long the world had been shedding its skin all around them, replacing its landscape, its population, first with the sludge of ash and dust on what was once the forest floor, and then with all those other animals now joining the herd in its last journey, maybe even the smell of blood in place of rusted metal. People being recycled by dead bodies.
The elephants marched on into the night. •
Sarp Sozdinler is an Amsterdam-based writer. His work has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Burial, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. He serves as the editor of The Bulb Region. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at www.sarpsozdinler.com