THE BONE ORCHARD

The family lore had it my soul escaped my body during surgery when I was little. I was six, going on seven. The doctors wanted to give me a new heart but lost something else in the process. Some relatives said good riddance. My mother said, God bless your soul. Dad: “How the hell are we supposed to find a new one in this economy?”

Every night in bed, I pondered all the places my soul might’ve gone to. It had been too long gone and I didn’t even know where to start. I imagined my soul floating in the ether, mingling with other stray souls. Doing whatever it was that souls did when together. I trailed my thumb along the surgery scar on my chest as if it could map my soul’s trajectory. I said a prayer after her, assuming it was a she.

My therapist, my friends, often asked me what it was like to live without a soul. I told them you can’t miss what you never knew you had, which wasn’t entirely true. I told them I didn’t remember that far back. I watched them go on about their lives and inwardly criticized their wholeness. I tried to measure the weight of their souls.

Since my soul’s departure, I’d grown wary of losing more pieces of myself. My body was all I had left in the world, besides my mother and father. I was terrified of everything that could give me a disease. I promised myself never to become like one of those people who loses a limb, an organ, to cancer. Once, I came so close to losing a stub and begged the doctors to sew it back on, which they did. I didn’t even know what to do with it, but I couldn’t afford to be less than I already was.

Some days, I wondered if my soul and I had ever been friends. I wondered what I must’ve done to scare her off like that. What I could’ve done to make things better. I wondered if she’d like me better as a grownup. I wondered if my soul and I would ever become one again. I was curious about my soul’s soul, her own habits. I liked to imagine her as a vagabond, someone with an urge for wanderlust.

Years passed and I found my hairline shorter, my eyebrows thinner every week. Not only did I miss parts of my face, but there were also some unwelcome guests on my body: a rogue wrinkle on my left cheek, a mole where there shouldn’t be one. I didn’t know what to do with this much of me. I couldn’t even tell if I was essentially more or less.

I wondered if my soul had also gone through a similar transformation. I wondered if she and I had developed some kind of age gap in the intervening years. I wondered which of us ended up more likable, more social. Over the years I’d been accused of many things that hinted at a lack of character, including being spineless, headless, merciless, yet strangely never soulless, which confused me.

The day I turned fifty, I decided to post a Craigslist ad to track down my soul after all those years. I rented a corner in the Obits section. I tried to describe her as best as I could, filling in the blanks with my small fictions. I hung a dreamcatcher on my porch to lure her back. I scoured local papers, online forums, to see if I could stumble upon something that might seem like the kind of thing I would do. There were arsons, home invasions. Spring breaks gone wrong. Everything but a trace of my soul.

As I got older, I relinquished all hope. I’d forgotten altogether about my soul. I stopped thinking about her, about all the what-ifs. It was around then that one day, just before I would go out for my morning constitutional, my doorbell rang with frantic urgency. The dongs gave me a headache even before I could get to the door. When I grabbed at the knob, I sensed it before I saw it, that it was none other than my soul waiting on the other side. Her scent of warmth and familiarity wafted through the slits.

“What do you think we’d be like, you and I?” my soul asked me after I offered her a cup of tea and invited her in. She was by the kitchen island when she asked me this. She looked older than I’d imagined, weary yet robust. Her hair was frizzly and her smile was dim. Like me, she’d long lost the spark in her eyes.

I considered telling her that I’d thought about her question time and again. That I’d imagined us as two best friends, then as perennial enemies. That I’d fantasized a lot about becoming one with her one day, but then feared if becoming one might ruin her influence on me. That she was the only one I cared about in the whole wide world.

In the end, I never told her any of this. Instead, I said, “We’ll never know,” then served her the tea I promised.

That night, I dreamt of my soul. She stood at the edge of a vast, endless field, her silhouette wavering against the sun like a mirage. For a moment, I thought she might turn around and walk toward me, but she only stood there, existing in the space in-between.

When I woke up, I found myself crying. I slithered out of bed and tried on my old clothes. I took my morning constitutional in a new direction. I wrote in my journal for the first time in decades. I planted a small bonsai tree in my backyard that could double as a gravestone. I said a prayer I only half-remembered from my childhood. I chanted an elegy after her.

I bid my soul farewell.

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Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Masters Review, Vestal Review, and Pithead Chapel, among other venues. His work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the online journal The Bulb Region.