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. The fright would send the same coppery fumes up her throat. "Penny tummy," she used to call it. She got the penny tummy during her first trimester of pregnancy too. But those were happy pennies. They tasted like bitter cherries and bergamot and a hint of wild lavender. She reveled in tasting the playful bouquet of her unborn daughter, still in her perfumed belly. Safe and alive.

Zeynep pounded the pain from her chest and shook herself, like a dog shakes his coat after a bath in bitter remembrance. She looked past the oily smudge her temple left on the window, for landmarks, only to discover the world outside was one big smudge. Nothing hopeful beckoned from beyond the gauzy veil of fog whirring past. She turned to the empty, white seats; ominous, like neatly lined tombstones in a moving graveyard. A train, she wondered, how on earth? She wrapped her shawl tight around her shoulders, hoping to ease her motion sickness. That's right, she recalled, her warmest shawl. She put it on to watch the meteor shower outside, very early that morning 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 hastily as she went out. She rubbed the prickles from her skin. There must be an explanation, she assureed herself, that she could make sense of, perhaps if she hadn't dropped out of high school to have the baby. But there was nothing sound about a train with no tracks.

She certainly wouldn't be getting any answers staying in here, she reasoned. She slid the compartment door open, this time with heed, and laid her woolen shall over the airy, bottomless expanse. This way, she would not loose her conviction in the event she looked down again. Her hands turned white grasping onto the rails between compartments. Hair whipped at her face, taking little bites of her skin and obstructed her view of the door handle leading to safety from this tight rope walk of terror.

"Please God help me open this door!"

Her hair parted, not unlike the miracle of the Red Sea, and she yanked the safety machanism of the door open and threw herself in.

COMPERTMENT 2 - WAX FAMILY

Zeynep's nightgown was soaked with cold, briny sweat. She looked back through the small, rectangular window with rounded edges. 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 just as an elastic face, around the age of thirteen, snapped at her from centimeters away. The insideous face disapeared behind the back of a seat. "Memo?!" She held onto the back of the seat for emotional support, and peered around. The young boys 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 hollared and jabbed his face back in between the smudgily inked pages.

"I must be dreaming. A nightmare, thank God!"

Zeynep held her breath till her eyes were threaded with red and her arms were pinched with blue. She screamed "Wake up wake up wake up!"

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

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

Zeynep followed the trail of mentholated tobacco to the front of the compartment, where she found her mother, smoking in front of a small television. For the first time in 8 years, Zeynep broke her silence and spoke to her.

"Mom, what's happening? Is this death? Or pergatory?"

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

"Ali," 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. And the same, eight weeks later, when she confided about her pregnancy. She visited Madame Tousseau's Wax Museum on a school field a short time after. It reminded her so much of being home with her vacant, benign family, like wax dummies. While her peers remarked at the creepiness of the dummies, she 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.

Zeynep wouls spend four wonderful years being an attentive, energetic mother and never watched tv. In fact, there wasn't one to watch at the convent. But, misfortune crept into the Sister's house, and her vibrant daughter began to droop and wither. Her palor changed to resemble the dried lavender she smelled of and she died.

"Where's my little apple?" Ali's voice slithered through the seats. Zeynep felt her nightgown being lifted in the back. She turned around and looked into her uncle's slitted eyes.

"Right here." She impaled her knuckles into his adam's apple and swung the door open to the next carriage, leaving him clutching at his throat.

COMPARTMENT 3 - BITTER CHERRIES AND BERGAMOT

Zeynep breathed out through her nausea. Her head was spinning from the buoyant speed of the train. Just ahead, was the door leading to the train conducter. She felt the same relief 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 and found the accompanying hint of wild lavender. Her little girl was alive and playing hide and seek under the seat.

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

She pulled her daughter out and and ran her fingers over the landscape of her face. Ivory planes, hills of pink, two narrow patches of chestnut forest over two glassy pools of sage, mingled in the most divine paradise. She took her girl on her hip. They would stop this train and leave this place together and spend their lives dancing in tall grass and curling rocks under their toes. But as Zeynep marched through the final door, the baby disppeared from her arms and reappeared back in the compartment. Zeynep tried again and again, but each time, she would make the transition alone. She had no choice, but to get help and come back for her daughter. She ran through the gallow, without touching a finger to the rails, and barreled through the conductor's door.

COMPARTMENT 4 - ATHEISM

"Stop this train!"

Her foot was not met with ground, nor her cry with sound. She caught herself on the door like a cat on it's ninth life, and pushed herself back onto the ledge, in awe. What was left of her faced the most unspeakable, inconcievable, astounding, and terrifying truth she had ever known. The UNIVERSE. An infinite expanse of airless obsidian, with a single pinhole, light years away, through which a grain of light shone in. Finally, Zeynep's stomach settled in the utter and absolute stilless of space. But her heart could not behave as her stomach. Not without her little girl.

She closed the door to the Universe and her God. She paused in the windy torrent of the gangway, letting it sweep the great cosmos from of her clothes and hair. Zeynep stepped inside with her baby girl, motion sick once again. She retrieved her shawl from memories past and curled around her daughter on the aisle floor and they played until she woke up.