The draft.

Here's a draft of the intro to my short story collection about Turkey. Whaddya think?

Chapter One: You’re Going WHERE?
Late August, 2000: Old Town, Maine

In the bough of a distant pine, a lone cicada droned in its final summer desperation. Gathered together, moistly bemoaning our fates, the vast majority of my mother’s extended family stood in ridiculously hot dress clothes as we awaited the bride and groom ,who surely must have been at the point of death by dessication. It was the hottest day of the entire summer, and by some sort of cosmic joke, it was the one day where I had to be dressed in layers. The church was hot like a crematorium despite the ceiling fans and it wasn’t any better outside. I looked across the mirage-shimmery asphalt of the church parking lot to the distant Stillwater River, and for a lunatic moment I thought about launching myself from the protective huddle and flinging myself, fully clothed, into the frigid water. Instead, I took out the wand and bubble kit that I had been given and dutifully began to blow bubbles. I guess rice was out of the question; pigeons really do ruin everything. My mother was moments away from weeping; a child can sense these things. The heat pressed on us like hearthstones. One of the relatives detached herself from her own nuclear clot and came tapping over to my mother, who rallied a little. They began talking about how lovely the ceremony was and how perfect the bride and groom were together, and other such family-gathering swill. I began to tune out and go to the Happy Place, where there is ice-cream, igloos and rosy-cheeked gnomes making snow-cones for people. Then I noticed that both my mother and the relative had begun glancing at me in the natural pauses of the inane conversation. I tuned in a little. The relative turned to me and looked my up and down like she was sizing a garment. Her perfume, which apparently she had bathed in, was cloying and nearly brought me to the brink of sanity. She winked at me, which hackled the small hairs up and down my spine. I welcomed the chill.

“So”, she began, “your mother tells me that you are going to be going overseas in January.” Her eyes narrowed ever-so-slightly.

Saddened to leave the snow-cone gnomes behind, I told her that yes, indeed, I would be going abroad for my junior spring semester. We talked for a few moments about things like weight restrictions on carry-on luggage, how awful airline food was, and if I needed to get any shots. She told me about how one of her relatives (apparently no relation to me) went to Brazil and waded in a small pond and how ten days later, tiny white worms began to burrow out of her skin. My smile must have been wan; she changed subjects rather hastily. She had failed to ask the most important question of all, and I wondered if my mother had already spilled. If not, it was only a matter of time.

“Oh”, she said while folding her hands and putting them to her chin like a schoolgirl, “your mom didn’t tell me where you were going. Somewhere fun?” Her eyes glittered like the broken glass that littered the parking lot. My mother shot me the “behave” look: I had already convinced a few of my relatives that I was going to Cambodia, the Congo and Iran. I looked at her and told her that I was going to be going to Turkey to study at Bilkent University in Ankara. She looked at me like I was mildly developmentally challenged, and then looked to my mother for confirmation; confirmation and perhaps with not a small amount of accusation for letting me do this insanity. Her face screwed itself into a wrinkly ball of puzzlement as she digested the profundity of what I had said. My mind raced ahead to her next move, which would be to tell me of the horrors that surely awaited me in that Godless land. Sure enough:

“My GOD! But it’s so filthy there! Aren’t they Muslims? I hear they smoke hashish all the time. You can’t drink the water. Haven’t you seen Midnight Express?”

The entire diatribe took less than twenty seconds, during which she did not breathe once. Her naked horror was pitiful. I wanted to tell her that it was good old-fashioned American ignorance that was fueling her fear and revulsion, but my mother, baleful like a Byzantine icon, gritted her teeth ever-so-subtly and begged me with her eyes not to make a scene. After all, chances were good that this particular relative had never left the East Coast, and perhaps even the state. I began to explain that I had chosen Turkey because it was the fusion of my childhood interests–namely, the classical world–and the world of continental Asia, which I had been studying at that point for three years. She would have none of that. She then began to tell me that I would, in all probability, end up being kidnaped and executed, and that my pathetic remains would be paraded through the streets of Ankara (which, when she said it, was “Angola.” ) There was to be no victory for me here, but instead of conceding I told her that, indeed, that’s why *I* was going and not she, as I personally enjoyed the thought of being victimized as such. My mother’s fist clenched ever-so-slightly and I let it go. Mercifully, the drenched happy couple emerged for a photo opportunity and the relative momentarily lost her train of thought in the mad rush to take her four and a half billion pictures.

In the car on the way to the reception (where, thankfully, there was to be an open bar), I thought to how I had been constructing Turkey in my own mind. What I saw was the minaret-studded skylines of cities that were ancient when the horsemen thundered across Anatolia’s broad plateaux. I saw arid islets rising from azure seas filled with the wary octopus and color-shifting squid and the sunken ruins of dozens of civilizations. I heard the muezzin cry to the faithful from the tiny minaret of a village’s singular mosque in the smoky dusk of a Central Anatolian evening. I felt the red earth of the land of the galloping mare’s head against my cheek. And there, as we passed through darkened pine forests, I could smell that earth. As quickly as I did, it was gone.