TE16 Turkish Delight

Medusa (short story) by Zeynep Çolakoğlu Translated from Turkish by Yasemin Yener

From the book of Medusa “My innocence caused some kindof scapegoating. By transforming me into the ugly Other, Athena took revenge from the victim. Now, when I look at the mirror, I see the ugliest creation of Athena, the most beautiful, wise goddess, and those who lock eyes with me are damned to be petrified. With her, we’re an inseparable whole; when I’m dead, her putting my head onto her shield to fire flames from my eyes to her enemies is the indication of this. Inside and out, divine and demonic, we’re together and meshed.” It was a year that my life was trying anew to dig holes in this narrow space in which it has been bouncing ceaselessly of the walls it has built around it. I had been feeling like the streets were too far away and the door of my house was locked on me. The summer had arrived. That awful, dry-heated, terrestrial summers during which I want to take off and hang my body to a hanger each year. Opening the window, as a cloud of dust filled in, I became aware of it. It must be that I wasn’t able to take my mind from that burdensome life in the Anatolia that makes me cave in even more. I’m not going to start with a sentence such as, “In the deserted land of the moor.” No. Moorland can be more crowded than the metropolises we complain of being so crowded all the time. This completely depends on how you define the concept… Is the crowd the flock of strangers around you that 245