THE MINISTRY OF DEEP CONVERSATIONS//Sarp Sozdinler

An hour into our date, Lea from the Acquisitions tells me it’s no surprise that tartare and torture start to sound the same after so many drinks, given the two are in fact homonyms in French.

“A what?” I ask, trying to make my voice sound as normal as possible.

“A homonym,” she says, then adds maybe she’s making a mistake, maybe it isn’t French but in Italian or Spanish instead, but who cares, what matters is that it was her last fiancé who taught her that, a Creole man who went by the name of Xavier and fought communism for a living until the day he died in a failed coup attempt in Venezuela last May. She tells me he was a Pisces and that was part of why it didn’t work out between the two of them, what with her being a Gemini who’s about to ascend into a bisexual Leo territory once past her upcoming thirtieth birthday.

“Homonyms,” I say, nodding into my martini glass.

To one side of our table, a young couple with matching Hare Krishna shoulder tattoos are stabbing at the wet lettuce leaves on their plates and playing with each other’s hands flirtatiously. The woman tells him at one point that she hasn’t been the same since Obama stepped down and that she’s still grieving after him through turkey-pardoning videos she binges on YouTube. The man tells her that he’s lately in two minds about whether he should join the Jehovah’s Witnesses or spend the initiation fee on a secondhand Toyota Corolla instead. They wield their forks between sentences like swords and smile as widely as they can to hide the tension in the air.

“Well.” Lea glances up at me in a way as if it’s the first time she sees me. “What about you?”

I level my gaze with hers and take another sip from my drink. “What about me?” I say.

“Any skeletons in the closet?” she asks.

I give her question a thought as my eyes veer sideways to this bald old woman who keeps sipping at her glass of red wine in the opposite direction of the young couple and nursing the largest soft-serve cone I’ve seen in the longest while. She smacks her lips at every two licks and refuses to use a napkin. The state of her mouth disgusts me to the point of having to set my glass down and never touching it again for the remainder of our night.

“I guess I want to be a mother soon enough,” I confess.

“Oh.” Lea stops chewing her bite. “As in?”

“As in find a suitable female companion and freeze some eggs up, I guess.”

I tell her that it is the first time I’m going out on a same-sex date and joke that I better get my ovaries checked before it’s too late, now that I’m over forty and recently divorced. She nods the whole time I talk, then leaves her fork and knife on the sides of her plate.

“That’s exactly the kind of thing Xavi would tell me,” she says.

In the pursuing silence, we let our eyes hop from one thing to another in the restaurant except each other. The young man at the next table tells his partner that he’s planning to crash at his aunt’s place for a while, one who works as a secretary for this past-life regression therapist somewhere down in Lafayette. In his words, his aunt is the closest thing to a doctor in the family and there is no way he wouldn’t take advantage of that as a health nut (“and for free”). To his partner’s dismay, he reaches for her hand from over the table and reassures her that distances won’t affect their relationship in any way, that he’ll do everything in his power to come visit her often.

“Did you know,” I turn back to Lea, “that I used to be a nun in one of my past lives?”

“A nun?” she asks, arching a brow.

I nod my head and say, “A nun,” and then go on to explain that I used to look after a dozen Prussian kids in an orphanage in my fifth cycle of life. I tell her that I’d seen a lot of serious shit going down in my day—beatings, neglect, you name it.

“But not quite anything like this,” I say, looking down at what’s left of my glass. “I got brutally abused by this homeless boy one Christmas night.”

“Oh.” The wrinkles on Lea’s forehead scramble in distaste as she beckons at the waiter for the check. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

Upon the cue, the waiter starts gliding through the spontaneously formed aisles between the tables like a bee pollinating the patrons. I avert my gaze in embarrassment at this faux marble Pythagoras statue standing by the entrance door. The disgraced philosopher looks too big and white compared to everything else on the dining floor. His eyes are pupilless and he seems to be missing his books and clothes on his person. His memberless crotch takes on a new meaning in the context of my date with Lea, looking as smooth and blank as the bedsheets in our hotel room upstairs.

“How did your life come to an end if you don’t mind my asking?” Lea says while fishing in her purse for the wallet. “I mean, as a nun.”

“Politics,” I say, looking up at the waiter who left the bill holder on Lea’s side of the table. “The new vice principal up and turned the whole thing over and put me and my kids out on the street just like that.”

The waiter breaks into a cough but acts professional enough to pretend he has no idea what it is I’m going on. He’s giving his utmost best to not engage in eye contact.

“Did they at least give you guys a proper burial?” Lea asks.

“I wouldn’t know.” I shrug. “I’d probably moved on to my next life by then.”

In my next life, I tell her, I was reincarnated as one of the turnpikes facing the Hackensack River.

“A what?” she asks, looking distracted while calculating tip.

“And a good one at that.” I fix my gaze on her clueless face. “Never once did I let those bums drive past my turf without a ticket.”

Lea finally shifts her attention to me, bobbing her head up and down in slow coils. She looks at me as if she just can’t decide whether she should be more confused by my words or by the casual manner I delivered them. She waits for the punchline where the joker would usually explode into laughter, but the moment won’t arrive. Instead, I stare at her and she stares back.

“That’s all very interesting,” she finally says.

Angry voices raise from the next table as the girl with the Hare Krishna shoulder tattoo springs up from her chair and splashes her drink on her partner’s face. The old woman to our other side gobbles the last bite of her ice cream cone and then wipes her chin without caring to look up at the commotion over even once. The waiter bows his head at Lea for a kind thank-you and backs down to attend to the commotion.

“I’m sorry but I think I should get going,” Lea says.

“Oh,” I say, “I hope I could see you again.”

She pauses momentarily before letting out a sound from the back of her throat that could be interpreted as anything between pity and despair.

“Look,” she says, “I’m sorry but I don’t think this”—she wags her finger in the thick air between us—“is going to work out.”

The old woman next table suddenly collapses from her chair as if she’s just decided to do something about the gravity of the moment on my behalf. Lea and I exchange a glance. The waiter breaks away from the sobbing couple and rushes to the old woman who’s now writhing and moaning on the floor like a dying seal. I sneak a glance at the Pythagoras statue by the exit door and try to imagine the marble man in his true form: faint green veins showing through his temples and forearms; the vaguely flabby abs of a middle-aged man who worked out but didn’t have a consistent schedule. A pair of smelly feet.

“Homonyms,” I say, flitting my gaze between the old woman’s pointy heels and Pythagoras’s bare feet.

Lea doesn’t respond, leaving a handsome tip.

A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50) and awarded a finalist status at various literary contests, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. He’s currently living and working on his first novel in Amsterdam.