Compartmentalized

COMPARTMENT 1 - PENNY TUMMY

Hot, copper fumes climbed up Zeynep's throat and kindled her awake. For a second she expected to see her big brother's menacing, thirteen year old face, centimeters from hers. Back when they were children and shared a room, Memo would hover over her and breath gutteral, bullish breaths, until it stirred her awake. His features would stretch, like a rubber band across his face, and snap into a twisted, maniacal gang of eyes, nose, and mouth, that Zeynep did not recognize to be her own brother. This fright would send the same coppery fumes up her throat. "Penny tummy," she used to call it. She got penny tummy during her first trimester of pregnancy too. But those were happy pennies that tasted like bitter cherries and bergamot. She reveled in tasting the playful bouquet of her unborn daughter, still in her perfumed belly. Safe and alive.

Zeynep pounded the bitter remembrance from her chest. Pounding who she was and what she's suffered to the surface. Where she was, seemingly remained buried somewhere deep, for she had not a clue

Her eyes , tried to make sense of what lied outside the window beside her. She scanned for landmarks, beyond the oily smudge left by her forhead on the window, only to discover the world outside was one big smudge. Nothing hopeful beckoned from the gauzy veil of fog whirring past. She turned to empty, ominous, white seats; lined neatly like tombstones in a mobile graveyard. A train, she wondered, why on earth?

She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders, hoping to ease her motion sickness. That's right, she recalled, her warmest shawl. She had put it on to watch the meteor shower outside, very early that morning and and, and, the rest was blank.

Zeynep searched for a call button in the desolate carriage. Or one of those emergency levers you pull to alert the train conductur of an emergency. But there was no such comfort to be found. She made her way down the white aisle, to the compartment door and flung it open hastily. Her eyes glanced down mid-step, between cabins, and her fissured, memory worn heart nearly came out of her throat. The train seemed to hover over nothing more than frigid, precipitous CLOUD, not fog. Zeynep fell back into the cart just as quickly as she went out. She rubbed the prickles from her skin. There must be an explanation, she assured herself, that she could make sense of, perhaps, but there was nothing sensible about a train with no tracks.

She certainly wouldn't be getting any answers in here, she reasoned. She slid the compartment door open again, this time with heed. Hair whipped at her face, taking little bites of her cheeks. With a swat of her hand, she misses her step. Leaving both her legs dangling over the airy, bottomless expanse. Her shawl swims off her shoulders and gets caught on a hook, below.

COMPERTMENT 2 - WAX FAMILY

Zeynep's nightgown was soaked with cold, briny sweat. The chairs in here were older and cushioned. She looked back, over her bare shoulder. Her shawl would have to wait outside in the gangway until she gathered her gumption. Perhaps there was someone she could speak to in here. She turned and faced an elastic face, around the age of thirteen, that snapped into a motley crew of features. The insideous face disapeared behind the back of a seat. She followed the young boy to his seat, where his face was buried behind a comic book. She reached out slowly, through the sands of time and lowered the glossy cover.

"Get off, DOG FACE!" Memo hollered and jabbed his face back in between the blotty inked pages.

"I must be dreaming. wake up. wake up. wake up."

Zeynep held her breath and pinched herself, untill her eyes were threaded with red and her arms were pooled with blue.

"Moooom, Zeynep's being a psycho," Memo whined. "She won't let me reeeeaaad."

"Zeynu, come watch the tv with me," an anesthetized voice crooned.

Zeynep followed the trail of mentholated tobacco smoke to the front of the compartment, where she found her mother, smoking in front of a small television embedded in the bck. of a set. For the first time in 16 years, Zeynep broke her silence and spoke to her.

"Mom, what's happening? Is this death? Pergatory?"

Her mother raised the volume of her true crime show, ashing on the seat next to her.

"Brother!" her mother beckoned, "Come do something with your niece until I finish my program."

Zeynep hid behind one of the seats. Her mind began to drift, to Saturn or Morroco; the places she escaped to when her Uncle Ali was called upon to "do something with her." Her mother didn't speak or look away from the tv, when Zeynep confided to her about the rape that year. She got to visit Madame Tousseau's Wax Museum during a school field trip once. It reminded her so much of being home with her vacant, benign family, like the wax dummies at Tousseau's. While the other kids giggled about the creepiness of the dummies, Zeynep planned her escape from home. Knowing she would never make it to Saturn or Morocco, she settled on a convent, run by the Sisters of Divine Hope. And that's just where she went. As far as she knew, no one ever looked for her. And for that, she thanked her new God.

A time came when Zeynep yearned to be the mother she never had. However, with the ill timing of a financial crisis, and ill choice of partners, Zeynep found herself pregnant and moving back in with the forgiving sisters. 6 months later, she gave birth to a baby girl, she named Joan, after her favorite Saint. Joan was delivered over the warm, smoothed stones of the monestary floor. And Zeynep would spend the next three wonderful years being an attentive, energetic mother, who never watched tv year. In fact, the monestary didn't even have a tv. Sadly, on the fourth year, misfortune would crept into the Sister's house, and her vibrant Joan began to droop and wither. Her palor changed to resemble the dried lavender that hung in the doorways of the convent.

Zeynep felt her nightgown being lifted in the back. She turned around and looked into her uncle's slitted eyes. "There's my little apple." his voice slithered from between his tobacco stained teeth .

"Right here!" and with that, Zeynep impales her knuckles into his adam's apple. She swings the door open to the next carriage, quite literally throwing caution to the wind and leaving him clutching at his throat.

COMPARTMENT 3 - BITTER CHERRIES AND BERGAMOT

Zeynep gasps out the bolts of adrenaline and excitement from finally standing up to her uncle. Just ahead, was the door leading to the train conducter. She felt the same relief she felt when she arrived at the convent doors with her belly full of perfume. She could smell it now; the scent of bitter cherries and bergamot. Zeynep dropped to her knees. Her little girl was alive and playing beneath the seats.

"I found you!" Zeynep plays along, while years of heartsickness streamed out from her eyes.

She takes her girl on her hip and runs her fingers over the landscape of her long lost daughter's face; Ivory planes, hills of pink, two narrow patches of chestnut forest over two glassy pools of sage, coming together into the most divine paradise.

It was time to stop this train and resume their lives, dancing in tall grass and curling rocks under their toes. Convinced, Zeynep marches through the conductor's door, but each time she passes the threshold, joan disappers from her hips and reappears in compartment three. Zeynep tries again and again, but each time, she makes the transition alone. She has no choice, but to get help and come back for her daughter. She flies through the gallow, and falls through the unlocked door.

"Stop this train!" she screams out.

Well, her foot was not met with ground, nor her cry with sound. And, luckily,She caught herself on the door like a cat on it's ninth life. What she saw then left her in awe.

COMPARTMENT 4 - MEET YOUR MAKER

She faced the most unspeakable, inconcievable, astounding, and terrifying truth she has ever known. The UNIVERSE; the infinite, airless expanse. Below her, she saw a woman wrapped in a wool shall, looking up at her.

She closed the door to the Universe and her God. She paused in the windy torrent of the gangway,in the windy torrent of the gangway, letting it sweep the great cosmos from off her. Zeynep stepped inside Cabinthree, curled around her daughter on the aisle floor and they played until she woke up.