Turkish Delight

By Michael Hugh Stewart

               For CW

One woman is wearing an ostentatious necklace. Rented, someone said. The insurance company paid two men in poorly fitting suits to guard it. They are never more than a dozen feet from her, or rather the necklace. When she gets up to dance, they follow her. The two men in an awkward, loose embrace, waltzing alongside her and her partner, ready, one assumes, for violence. When she sits, one of them pulls out her chair. They called her Ma’am.

I am also in a poorly fitting suit. We, the new adults, have been put on display at the front table. I have met a few of the others before, but I only know Caroline. This is her party. She is sixteen in a blue dress. Royal blue, her freckled back exposed. She is already good at this. I watch her make the rounds: at each table the same smile on her face and the same laugh. She laughs, I have learned, just like her mother. The blue party favors match her dress. And at each table, after the pleasantries, she kneels down, and the nearest person takes their knife and fork and carves a little out of her back. I watch a woman arrange a small piece on her dessert plate and take a picture with her cell phone. The wound is bloodless and heals quickly, leaving only a freckle.

She has a secret, a tattoo. In just a few years she will have a dozen. But for now, there is only one, and as far as I know, I am the only person who has seen it. Mine matches hers. She taped a needle to the end of a pencil and smeared ink over where she poked. My blood and blue Bic ink on her fingertips. Mine will wear away before I finish college; I do not know about hers.

I am talking to her mother, who is nice to me. I guess everyone is nice to me, but she is kind. That laugh again, it is so strange to hear Caroline’s laugh in a different mouth. I watch Caroline kneel at another table, and I ask her mother, Why? She answers as if it were the most self-evident thing in the world. Because she’s sixteen. And because she tastes like a rose.

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About Author

Michael Hugh Stewart is the author of four books and recipient of the Rhode Island Council
for the Arts Fellowships in both fiction and poetry. He teaches creative nonfiction at Brown University. You can follow Michael on Instagram @michael.hugh.stewart or find him at his website here.