Talk Vomit

By Sarp Sozdinler

The day my eldest cousin cast a spell on me I was sucking on the icy remains of my Diet Coke until my tongue went cold and completely numb. She started accusing me of being a limp-dicked prick, of gobbling down her last onion ring without asking first—a crime to which I still plead not guilty. However much I tried to convince her otherwise, she refused to accept that it was in fact Cricket, our family labrador, who swiped the last bite of her three-storied caramel swirl with a nimble twirl of the tongue when my cousin was not looking. Instead, my cousin started mumbling some foreign words at me, words that I failed to understand but could tell by the way she was looking at me were nothing short of ill-intentioned. The day after, I started noticing some valuable pieces of our household going strangely missing or getting damaged to an unsalvageable degree one after the other. First, it was my father’s World Cup 1998 Luis Figo collector’s card mysteriously torn into two by a phantom perpetrator, then the electric shortage pausing an 8-bit Tsubasa figure mid-bicycle kick on my Atari. My Pokemons could somehow never fulfill their destiny, their evolution stagnated to the point of dwarfism. Even my Tamagotchi stopped eating her food shortly after, until she gave her last breath and left me all alone one Christmas evening. These days, I admit to taking pleasure in watching my cousin serve the third year of her twenty-eight-year sentence somewhere uptown, one hundred and thirty miles from home. With no possibility for parole. One garden hour a day, in state prison. Every night, before going to sleep, I fantasize about writing her a letter, one that would read something along the lines of: Look who’s won now, motherfucker? But then every day, shortly after I wake up, I find another part of me gone missing, something deep and hollow, reminding me of the curse I couldn’t dispel even after all these years. Reminding me of those lifeless images of the man my cousin had cut open with a breadknife, obviously under the influence of some heavy narcotics. So, like, good-fucking-luck fucking around with a kid half your age, queen. Good luck with everything karmic you now have to deal with. Thanks for absolutely nothing.