Ad Astra

by Ecem Yucel

“Everybody knows why I’m tied to the bed,” says my grandfather, lying on an iron-framed bed with no pillows nor a blanket. On a religious holiday like this, the house is warranted to crawl with people. Alone in the bedroom, door open, he intently listens to the laughter of the children running in the hall, the score of the football match the men watch in the next room, and the gossip of the women in the kitchen, who simultaneously cook and smoke, and sip Turkish coffee in-between. A rope of old sheets around his belly reaching under the bed frame ties him to the bed. His legs, arms, feet, and hands are swollen like deformed balloons with blue veins and brown spots drawn on them. 

“Yes, but why are you tied to the bed?” I ask again. 

“Because if I’m not, I elevate. Float in the air,” he says impatiently. “My limbs are inflated, and my kids don’t want me to drift away.” 

“Isn’t it nice of them, though?”

“They only care because I give them the whole sum of my monthly pension,” he says. 

I take a look around his shade of loneliness reflecting from the old, faded wallpaper: a sickly, light yellow, like the skin color of people who are very, very close to death. 

“How do you spend your days?” I ask, not sure if I want to hear the answer. 

“Alone. Tied. Watching the ceiling. Watching the shadows moving on the ceiling. Listening. Imagining of rising to the sky on a sunny day.” In his eyes sparks a longing. 

“I don’t like the thought of that,” I say, “or how would we find you again?” 

“You wouldn’t,” he says. 

I think about our memories to change the subject and make conversation. I quickly realize that we don’t have many. When you grow up with an estranged father, it’s harder to make memories with his father. Though, I have a few vivid pictures stored in the back of my mind. Like how my grandfather’s dogs were always tied in front of their dog houses whenever my mother took me to stay with my grandparents and their bark would scare the shit out of us. The day my grandfather showed me my first cow, slowly chewing grass in the green, windy meadow behind his house: a scene looked like it jumped right out of Heidi. The horseflies my cousin caught and kept in a matchbox –around whose tiny legs he’d tie a thread and make them fly holding onto their new leash. How my grandfather saw and yelled at my cousin for torturing the poor horseflies. The frantic chickens, rushing to eat their feed, whose unpredictable agility I found scary. The white, beautiful tumbler pigeons my eldest uncle used to raise, captive in their cages, whose flight, let alone tumble, I never witnessed, something I was always sad about. The evening we kept sitting at the bench of the wooden table in the garden until it got really dark, talking in low voices when the fireflies surrounded us. How their light was strong enough to see a green glint in my grandfather’s eye, which made me think that every old person had a youth captive in them, whose flight I was never going to witness because of the cage of time, just like the tumbler pigeons. His warning about the sea; that the sea already claimed people who could swim as its own, and its real problem was to find a way to draw the ones who couldn’t swim in. How he gave me my father and mother’s engagement and wedding photos that he had kept all those years when I was much older, as well as a few from my father’s childhood and teen years. How I kept looking at a black and white picture of a younger version of my father, 18, maybe 19 years old, playing the drums, looking all handsome and a bit like Paul McCartney in the 60s, and was grateful to see my roots. 

“Remember that borek grandma used to make?” I say. He looks at me. “I thought I’d never see it again after she was gone,” I continue. “But when I came for a visit years later, you made some for me. It tasted just the same. As if she was hiding in the kitchen, and whispering to you, No need to upset her now. Just tell her you learned the recipe from me.” 

He chuckles. “It was my recipe,” he says. “She learned it from me.” Carefully, he raises his hands and shows them to me. “Sorry, I can’t make more.” 

“It’s okay,” I say, my heart’s a little bit broken. I lean down and kiss him on the cheek. He closes his eyes. 

“Maybe it’s because you were seldom here, but you are my favourite among my grandchildren,” he purrs. “Look how grown you are now. I look at you, and I see a bit of her in there.” 

I smile. He frowns. 

“Do I really though?” he murmurs. “It’s getting harder to recall her face.”

The phone call comes when least expected: during a romantic dinner date. 

“There was nothing we could do,” says my cousin. “I don’t know how, but the rope became untied when we weren’t looking. He passed through the open window. Flew away.” 

I end the call. I clench my teeth to distract myself from my burning sinuses. In the night sky, I look for his silhouette against the half moon. 

“Are you okay?” asks my date, “What happened?” 

“A sunny day,” I reply, still watching the unblemished moon. 

Ecem Yucel (she/her) is a Turkish-Canadian poet, writer, translator, and interpreter. She holds an MA in World Literatures and Cultures from the University of Ottawa and works as a cultural interpreter. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Evergreen Review, Salamander Magazine, HAD, The Hooghly Review, Maudlin House, Overheard, Stanchion, Autofocus, Gone Lawn, Idle Ink, and more. Find her at www.ecemyucel.com or on Twitter: @TheEcemYucel and Instagram: the.ecem.yucel.