Even though the beautiful bride in the puffy wedding dress who trails Turkish student Leyla is a ghost, the more sinister specter in “The Peace Bride” is the ever-looming threat of gender violence. As she makes her way back to her dorm one night, at every turn, menacing figures track Leyla’s movements, and in a strange calculus, her every move must be painstakingly executed to avert harm to her body. The aforementioned Peace Bride, who lost her life after a vicious attack while on a journey for peace, is evidence that even the “nice girls” are not safe from this monster. I chose “The Peace Bride” because in this bold and visionary feminist tale, we are confronted by a menace that is manifest and total, and yet, like every captivating horror story, our hero is a worthy opponent. — Guest Judge Julie Ironmuanya
Our faces are warm from too many cocktails, our makeup smudged sweaty from dancing. Ayşem asks me to stay over, but I want to wake up in my dorm room, to start studying right away.
“What a nerd,” she says, pinching my cheeks and then tucking my disheveled hair behind my ears. She flags down a taxi. Ayşem’s eyes widen when I open the front door and sit next to the driver. I smile at him and wave to my friend from the window. I tell the driver I’m going to the university dorms.
“You have an unusual accent,” he says. “Where are you from?”
“I grew up in America,” I say. “My parents moved there when I was very young, and now I’m back for university. You know where the dorms are?”
“You’re very pretty,” the driver says, ignoring my question.
When I avert my eyes, I see a flash of white in the rearview mirror. A woman is sitting in the back seat. A puffy wedding dress overwhelms her diminutive form.
I recognize her right away. She is the girl who hitchhiked across Europe wearing her wedding dress. When she got to Turkey, she was photographed beaming from the passenger side of a truck, white tulle spilling out over muddy hiking boots, flashing a peace sign. Peace Bride Embarks on Tour of Turkey! the early headlines trumpeted. Bride from Europe to Hitchhike Across Turkey for Peace!
Shortly into the Turkish part of her excursion, the Peace Bride was found raped and murdered. New headlines accompanied the same photo.
“Poor girl,” my aunt murmured, reading the news. “I suppose nobody told her that Turkey is not a European country.”
Now, the Peace Bride sits in the back seat of the cab, looking pale but unscathed, save the rust-colored streaks marring her white dress.
“See how he’s looking at you?” the Peace Bride says. “It’s the same look, the same look the truck driver was giving me.”
The tulle rustles as she leans forward to whisper in my ear, “That look is my last memory of being alive.”
I watch the cab driver’s eyes.
I see that the Peace Bride is right.
Two years ago, Ayşem was kidnapped from the parking lot outside of a market in the neighborhood where she was born and raised, a market she visits weekly to pick up groceries for our aunties who can no longer carry heavy things. Her arms full of summer vegetables, she didn’t notice the man waiting by her car door. With her blond hair and freckles, in her midriff-baring clothes, Ayşem must have looked to the assailant like a foreigner, a dishonorable sort of woman. He tried to rape her, choked her when she kicked him away, and then drove her car onto the highway before she clawed at the door handle and tucked and rolled out of the speeding vehicle.
Another driver pulled over and took Ayşem to the hospital. She spent a long time in intensive care. She needed plastic surgery to make her face look like it did before.
While she recovered, our aunties discussed her choice of clothing, her bare midriff and low-rise jeans. The aunties sighed and clicked their tongues and shook their heads.
“It’s not your fault,” I told Ayşem one day, sitting at the beach. I had learned this through student organizing at my U.S. high school, where I was co-president of the Feminist Union. FU was both our acronym and our general philosophy. My friend already knew this but appreciated me saying it: FU, patriarchy. She would keep wearing cropped tops and tight jeans.
The aunties talked about the Peace Bride, too, her bright smile, her naiveté, what in the name of Allah she could have been thinking to hitchhike alone around Turkey wearing a wedding dress.
Now that she is reconstituted into something immaterial, the Peace Bride looks quite different from the girl in the photos, although the wedding dress and beatific smile are unmistakable. She swings her feet, still clad in muddy hiking boots, back and forth impatiently. She leans forward.
“That alcohol on your breath and the blouse you’re wearing are not doing you any favors,” she hisses in my ear. “But you can still be the right kind of girl.” Her breath is cold and I shiver and pull my shawl tightly around me, covering my exposed arms and neck.
“Are you a girl?” the cab driver asks and the question confuses me.
I hear myself laugh nervously: “I suppose I’m not a boy.”
He repeats his question, now leering openly, and my stomach drops as I realize: He’s asking whether I’m a girl or a woman. Whether I’m a virgin.
“Why would you tell him you came from America?” the Peace Bride growls. “Of all places, America. You might as well have called yourself a whore.”
She’s right. All the taxi driver knows of America comes from Hollywood movies dubbed into Turkish so that the women have unnaturally high, cloying voices and spend their time having sex in the bedrooms of sprawling suburban homes. I silently curse Hollywood and all the scantily clad, leg-spreading actresses therein. Then I take back this unfeminist thought and curse the producers instead.
“You know, movies about America are very inaccurate. They don’t show how America really is, and besides, that’s a very rude question,” I say.
“Now tell him you’ve just remembered your grandfather is waiting for you,” the Peace Bride says.
“I didn’t realize how late it was,” I tell the driver.
The Peace Bride nods encouragingly.
“My grandfather is expecting me at home. I actually won’t have time to go back to my dorm.”
Before the driver can reply, I make a performative cell phone call to tell my grandfather I’m on my way home in a cab. I ask if I can borrow some cash to pay the fare.
“Nice work,” the Peace Bride says. “Give him the address. I don’t know where we are now, but we are certainly not en route to your dormitory.”
Outside, the city lights have faded into the distance. Tall trees blur by.
I hang up the phone and say my grandparents’ address.
I see the cab driver recalculating. Worried grandparents. A wealthy neighborhood.
“Do you have kids?” I ask.
“Three girls.”
I could forget all about myself and feel sorry for these girls, but instead I quickly reply: “We are three, too. I have one brother and one sister.”
If I say the right words, will he recognize me as a daughter? As a sister? As a human?
“If you wait for him to feel ashamed you’ll be waiting forever,” the Peace Bride tells me.
“Don’t twirl your hair like that,” the cabdriver says in a tight, hungry voice.
I look at the sideview mirror and try to catch the Peace Bride’s eye.
“Don’t look at me like you’re looking in the mirror,” the Peace Bride admonishes me. “You’re a nice Turkish girl. A family girl.”
It’s true. I don’t ride in cabs. I take the bus, or my grandpa or my cousins drive me. This is the first time I’ve been in a cab on my own, or even out by myself in Istanbul at night.
The Peace Bride and I both feel the shift in the air when the cab driver decides not to rape or murder me. We feel the car change lanes when he stops speeding aimlessly down a deserted highway and moves instead in the direction of my grandparents’ home. It’s a tentative decision, provisional, and could change at any time.
After all, a nice girl, a family girl, would not be out by herself late at night. She would not drink or dance or sit in the front seat of a cab. She would not live in America or Europe or any place other than at home, in her country, with her family. She would not keep so many hard vowels in her mouth to weigh down her speech.
The night swallows kilometers of wordless highway until I finally recognize Bakırköy, its quiet tree-lined neighborhoods within walking distance of the sea. I direct the cab driver to our street and he lets me out. My grandfather is waiting at the entrance to our driveway.
“You know, people might wonder what a young girl is doing out on her own so late at night,” the driver tells him with a suggestive grin. “You’re lucky no harm has befallen her.”
My grandfather counts at least four times the fare into the cab driver’s outstretched hand, the cab driver still smiling his leering smile, my grandfather looking like the cab driver is a cockroach he would like to crush.
The Peace Bride grins triumphantly from the back seat as the cab pulls away.
* * *
I see her next in a recurring dream. We’re in the cab again, and she’s swinging her feet, bits of dried mud flaking off of her boots and onto the floorboards. “Are-you-a-girl,” she repeats in a singsong voice that matches the rhythm of her feet.
“If you sat back here with me you could choke him with your shawl,” she says, undoing the sash from her waist to demonstrate how to tighten a swath of fabric around a neck.
But in the dreams I am stuck in the front seat, my limbs leaden, my clumsy American tongue primed to say the wrong thing, or nothing at all. I want to scream, but my tongue is too heavy. Still I take comfort in her now familiar blood-streaked dress, the muddy boots that traversed two continents.
On the third night, the words finally roll out of my mouth. “Why don’t you visit me in the daytime?”
And this is how we become friends, the Peace Bride and I.
* * *
“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to see me again,” she confesses over beer on the Bakırköy shore.
“And why not?”
“You’re becoming more Turkish every day, and I’m a foreigner.”
I consider this.
“I’m friends with a lot of immigrant girls, but you’re the only dead one,” I say. I tell her about my Turkish-American and Turkish-German friends who have made lives for themselves here in Istanbul: Damla, beat up by a gang of American kids who surrounded her chanting “Terrorist!” in her Chicago public school after 9/11, now studying political science. Nehir, who grew up in a Turkish neighborhood of Berlin and took boxing lessons so she could fight skinheads, who laughs too loud and long and plays hip hop from a boom box for all to hear.
The Peace Bride smiles quietly. I wait for her to tell me about her adventures in Europe. I imagine green hills and friendly truck drivers. I imagine the European truck drivers were enthusiastic about her project of promoting peace through bridal hitchhiking. That they told her about faraway wives and children as they shared their meals. That she listened to their dreams as she watched a continent’s worth of landscapes roll by.
I wonder if there are different rules in Europe about the conditions under which men will see you as a whore-who-deserves-to-die. I wonder whether her aunties taught her those rules. I wonder whether she ever followed rules she disagreed with, like I do, or always refused, like Ayşem.
“Could you go home to Europe to visit?” I ask her.
She shakes her head sadly. And I get the feeling that I shouldn’t ask anything about her life before she became a ghost, about those memories that now belong only to her faraway family and friends.
* * *
That summer, I move out of the dorms and in with my grandparents. Like most grandmothers, my Anneanne passes her days at home watching the television news, which is updated hourly with new incidents of the mothers of martyred soldiers wailing in agony, the mothers of car accident victims sobbing in the wreckage, the school pictures of shiny-haired victims of honor killings, flood victims if it has been raining a lot, bombing victims if there has been any recent terrorism, and of course the Peace Bride. Sitting in an overstuffed chair with the middle sunken in the shape of her body, my grandmother watches the screen, shaking her head and slapping her knee. “Vah, vah vah. Just look at the state of our country.”
Whenever I leave home, she bids me goodbye with a litany of advice as I tie my shoes. “Leyla, your outfit! May Allah protect you, you’ll catch a chill. Take this sweater!” “Leyla, look both ways before you cross the street, there are many car accidents!” “Leyla, stay away from crowded places, the terrorists are bombing!” “Leyla, may Allah protect you, don’t talk to strange men.”
May Allah protect her, if my grandmother knew I had a boyfriend I think she might have a heart attack. So I don’t tell her about Faz, or about our plans to move together to the United States after we graduate. I just kiss her goodbye and say, “OK Anneanne, don’t worry.”
After I graduate from university, I get a job as a counselor for homeless girls at a group home in San Francisco. I stay there for three years, the longest I have ever been away without visiting my grandparents. A good part of those years is spent thinking of all the ways these girls might die and trying my best to prevent each one. My efforts are not always rewarded.
I take the first death particularly hard. Mika had a contagious laugh that bubbled up from somewhere deep in her belly. At her memorial service, I can’t stop sobbing. We serve Mika’s favorite foods, cake and ice cream.
After the service, the girls huddle in the backyard and pass around a bottle of brown liquor wrapped in a paper bag. They do this often and whenever I’m on the night shift I pretend not to see. Better to have them drinking together in the backyard than out in the wider world where harm might befall them.
Whenever they drink, the girls pour some out before the first sip, listing the names of friends they’ve lost in their young lives. “For the homies,” one of the girls will say, and then they are quiet for a moment. One solemn moment before peals of laughter rise again into the night sky. I think the girls know I can see them, but they are respectfully furtive as they pass the paper bag, and I always keep my distance.
On the night after Mika’s memorial, I approach the huddle of girls and my red-rimmed eyes met theirs. “Shit, here come Miss Leyla,” CC says and before she can stash the bag in her puffy jacket, Tonya snatches it from her hand and passes it to me. The girls watch me pour a shot’s worth out onto the grass before I hand the bottle back to Tonya and retreat wordlessly to the kitchen, where I watch them from the window as I clean the evening’s dishes.
* * *
When I finally save up enough vacation days to visit Istanbul, the Peace Bride is waiting for me. The conservative government has raised taxes on alcohol to make the price of beer as obscene as the sin of its consumption. Still, because it is our tradition, the Peace Bride and I share a beer on the beach of Bakırköy. I take a swig and pass it to her, but as always it dribbles right through her body and onto the sand. “A waste,” she says.
I shake my head and tell her that if she ever leaves me, no matter how much the price of alcohol goes up in this country, I’ll pour some out for her.
Sometimes the Peace Bride looks out at the families and their seaside picnics. Looks with shimmering eyes at living girls sweating in the summer sun, laughing and pouring tea for their families from thermoses and semavers, swigging beer with their boyfriends. The Peace Bride looks lonely and I reassure her: “There are dead girls everywhere.”
I tell her about all the dead girls I know. Mika and the others. Candy, who loved to sing hymns (at the top of her lungs, all day): stabbed in a park, killer unknown. Tish, who loved old movies: overdosed on heroin outside of the food bank. Jazmyn, who snorted when she laughed: killed by a cop on the passenger side of a stolen car just days before her 18th birthday. Halima, shy and smart: hit by a bullet meant for her boyfriend. Girls who fit their hearts into a suitcase and ran away, girls who planned on freedom.
The Peace Bride listens, quiet, and accepts the bottle I offer her. “For the homies,” the Peace Bride says in that odd placeless accent of hers, and finally smiles, taking a swig and leaving a patch of wet sand that will disappear with the rising tide.
* * *
The Peace Bride updates me on her hauntings as we sit on the shore of Bakırköy where refugee families from Afghanistan and Syria now sprawl on rugs and straw mats under trees, drinking tea like everyone else. This patch of beach has changed in the wake of war and invasion. Some of our Turkish neighbors now avoid the shore, finding it recently “too crowded.”
For our part, the Peace Bride and I still like to drink here, among the Turkish youth in summer clothes playing pop music and chain-smoking foreign cigarettes, the Afghani women shooing their children into the shade, the children screaming with glee as they run into the water and out again.
As I listen to the Peace Bride’s voice, these summer sounds fade away and I am transported to the scenes of her hauntings. Her ghost stories are better than the sad stories on the television news, better than the hopeless stories told and retold by grandmothers and aunties as cautionary tales.
* * *
“Kick his ass out!” she yells at the passengers on a dolmuş, where a middle-aged man is beating a young woman for causing him to think impure thoughts by wearing a miniskirt, which has ruined his Ramazan fast.
“Go on, push him!” the Peace Bride yells in the ears of stylishly coiffed dolmuş passengers, on their way to have a beer with girlfriends who are also wearing miniskirts.
The Peace Bride sneers at the dolmuş men when they do nothing, “Why can’t you do something even this simple?”
“Like this!” she yells, kicking a muddy hiking boot out from beneath the tulle to demonstrate. But the dolmuş men just sit there, the smell of their sweat mixing with hair gel and cologne.
If she was a corporeal body, the Peace Bride would eject the aggressor from the dolmuş with a swift kick to the behind, send him flying through the doorway the driver has left open to allow air to move through the stultifying heat. But as a ghost, the best she can do is feel herself kicking. The best she can do is haunt.
Does the assailant sense a ghostly foot pummeling his backside? Is he knocked off balance for a moment? It’s hard to tell as the other passengers, in a cloud of confusion and cologne, watch the beating, stunned and motionless.
* * *
The very next day, the Peace Bride is riding the metrobus, people jammed together like small fish fried in the same hot oil. A man from Afghanistan, perhaps thinking he can get lost in this crowd, presses his whole body against a Turkish woman, grabs with his hands. She hits him with her purse and shrieks, “Don’t you think everyone sees what you’re doing, you pervert?”
Another passenger immediately stands and offers the woman his seat. “Sit here, sister,” he says and towers menacingly over the Afghani man. “This is Turkey, you animal. And if you want to live another day in this country, you will get off this bus at the next stop.”
The Peace Bride looks on as the metrobus man, with his clothing and hair gel practically identical to that of the frozen dolmuş men, springs into action.
She shakes her head in wonder as the other men on the bus lean forward in solidarity, train their eyes menacingly on the hapless pervert.
“This man is a veritable nationalist hero, I guess,” the Peace Bride says, but no one hears her ironic commentary.
After he rescues the right kind of woman from the wrong kind of man, the Nationalist Hero asks the woman if she’s alright, and keeps a protective but respectful distance, and nods at her when she gets off at her stop.
“Be well, brother,” she says, disappearing into a sea of honking horns and bustling shoppers in the smog of twilight.
“They’re invading our country in droves, but this is still Türkiye,” one of the riders comments to another in a low voice. And they go on about how Afghani people are backward and won’t assimilate to the norms of Turkey, which depending on whose conversation you were to eavesdrop on, are secularism, or honor, or the protection of women and children.
I tell the Peace Bride about my neighbor Amira who spent her childhood in the quiet tree-lined suburbs of Kabul. As a child she went to school with boys, muddied her pinafore playing outdoors. And then the Americans rained down bombs, and none of this was allowed anymore.
The girls who remained in Afghanistan wore chadors, avoided windows, sometimes took their lessons in secret. Amira’s father decided to move his family to the belly of the beast, where they would be safer.
He died in the San Francisco hospital where she now works as a doctor, his body curled on starched white sheets, his face turned toward the poppies on his windowsill.
* * *
As our figures, silhouetted in twilight, melt into nighttime, the Peace Bride and I ponder the curving lines that outline the right kind of girl or boy, the wrong kind of woman or man. How the shape of belonging is different in every country, every town and city. Who is allowed to cross these borders and which lines are uncrossable.
We return to the subject of the Peace Bride’s hauntings, which range from shantytowns to mansions, from the eastern corner of Kars to the westernmost tip of Istanbul. The Peace Bride finds men who rape or beat or murder. She chokes them calmly, methodically, often using her bridal sash. Or trips them on the precipice of something high and jagged. Do the men turn purple in the face, gasping for air? Do they wake dazed and bloody, crumpled at the bottom of concrete stairwells?
I tell the Peace Bride how impressed I am by the sheer number of her hauntings. I admire her work ethic and sense of purpose.
“How do you manage to spend so much time with me?” I ask her.
I’m digging my bare toes into the sand and she’s floating a few centimeters above the ground, as is her way. She likes to sit up high enough so she can kick her feet back and forth, like a child on a swing or a hopeful bride in the passenger seat of a truck.
“I can haunt multiple people, all in different ways, all at the same time,” she says. “While I’m sitting here with you, I’m also choking a man who beat his wife. I’m digging my nails like knives into the necks of four cops who’ve assaulted sex workers in four different side alleys abutting Istiklal Street. And this is all while I’m telling you of my adventures.”
I nod.
As a living, breathing, ruddy-faced young optimist, the Peace Bride believed in peace and unity. But as a ghost, the Peace Bride is capable of incredible feats of violence.
I wonder if, despite her busy schedule of haunting, she ever longs for life, for living.
I ask, “Do you miss your husband, your country?”
“I was a bride for peace, not a bride for a husband,” she says. She lifts the top layer of tulle to show me how her bridal gown is embroidered with the flags of places she has been, the artwork of women she has met.
For a moment we are silent.
Then we talk about how we both hate the English word “husband,” and prefer the Turkish word “eş,” which can be translated most closely as “pair,” or “equal.” We have a lot in common, the Peace Bride and I.
* * *
I invite the Peace Bride to visit me in San Francisco. She could see America, I tell her. She could be a guest in my home.
The Peace Bride shakes her head ruefully but before she can refuse my offer outright I launch into a description of the people and places she could haunt. I tell her how many girls ended up in our group home after being sexually abused by their own fathers, their own uncles. Enough fathers and uncles for a lifetime of haunting.
I tell her about an unhoused woman who was raped while unconscious at a bus stop on a crowded street in San Francisco. The assault was recorded on a traffic camera and made the local news. We all know women who’ve been raped while sleeping outside—it’s a thing that happens often in America, I tell the Peace Bride. But the most striking aspect of this news report was the constant flow of pedestrians. All the people who witnessed the rape and did nothing, just kept walking.
“I’m sure you would like it in America,” I insist. “You know the public transportation is pretty good in San Francisco. You could haunt the bus stops in your free time, make everyone who passes understand that all women are human.”
She smiles.
The Peace Bride admits that, while travel is her specialty, she can cross only seas, not oceans.
* * *
At the airport, I kiss my grandparents goodbye and nod piously at my grandmother’s perennial reminder to “be a good girl, Leyla. Allah sees all.”
I stare out the airplane window and try to divine the future based on the changing shapes of clouds. But the futures I see loop back to my memories.
I remember Mika telling me about the time she and her father were coming home from the store with cake and ice cream for her eighth birthday party. The police pulled them over, pointed their guns. Mika tried to sit still in the backseat, her small body shaking, the ice cream melting in a grocery bag beside her.
From then on, Mika went to all the demonstrations: Perched on her father’s shoulders yelling for Alex Nieto and Tamir Rice, then shoulder to shoulder with the group home girls for Breonna Taylor and Banko Brown.
I remember making coffee for Mika in the group home kitchen, reading her fortune in the grounds.
“I see a road, Mika, and at the end someone is bending over someone else who is laying in a bed. You see?”
And she leaned in and nodded as I pointed to where the coffee grounds seemed shaped like a woman, maybe a nurse bending over a patient. “I think it’s you, after you finish your CNA degree and become a nurse. You see these squares? Those are books. You’ll have to study hard.”
Mika laughed and rolled her eyes.
But that night when I left work she was still curled on the couch, squinting at her textbook in the lamplight.
* * *
I went to visit Mika in the hospital the day before she died. I saw Mika’s mother bent over her daughter’s body, whispering in her ear. I imagined she was asking forgiveness, maybe proclaiming her unconditional love. I imagined she was saying words Mika needed to hear more than any words I might say, and I backed quietly away from the open doorway and left them there together.
I think of Mika’s mother now. I wonder if she will forgive herself for believing her child would be better off somehow, safer maybe, in a boy’s body. I wonder if she understands now that asking anyone to be someone other than who they are is its own kind of violence.
I think what I want for the girls is the same as what anyone wants for the young people they love. The elders who teach Black youth not to talk back if they’re stopped by the police. To keep their hands where the cops can see them. Who teach Muslim girls to cover up, not to go out alone at night. Who teach us we can lower our eyes, but still keep our heads up. I think about the scars on Ayşem’s body, and about how following the rules, rules you know by heart, exacts a different sort of price.
As the plane touches down, I say a prayer for all the people weighing the violence of the rules against the danger of breaking them.
* * *
At the group home, the girls start organizing protests. “No Justice, NO PEACE!” we scream on street corners and at bus stops and in front of City Hall.
In America there is no one to expect me home by nightfall. There is no one to purse her lips in disapproval until I change my outfit. It’s just Faz and me and a simple dinner kept warm on the stove of our studio apartment until I get home.
* * *
We move back to Turkey when I finally can’t stand the loneliness of America.
* * *
I introduce Faz to my grandparents. Our families want a wedding. I invite the Peace Bride, but she appears for only long enough to cackle at my hair, which Ayşem has shellacked into a shiny shape like a helmet.
After Faz and I get married, I watch the eyes of drivers and grocers, of aunties and uncles. I watch their eyes and see that I have become the right kind of girl. A nice girl, a family girl. I serve tea and coffee to guests, hot drinks that melt my accent.
I still drink beer with the Peace Bride, although alcohol has gotten too expensive and I’ve grown old enough to consider my liver. Tonight she doesn’t have her own bottle, so I clink my bottle against my wedding ring and say, “Şerefe!”
“Şerefe!” she repeats happily.
The gold of my wedding band glints in the setting sun.
Nehir has moved back to Berlin and started wearing the headscarf, which means she has to keep fighting skinheads. Ayşem has gotten a tattoo of Atatürk’s signature above her right hip, and weather permitting, it remains on proud display. Damla is in danger of being fired from her university faculty position for circulating a petition in favor of peace. I have gotten a job as an English teacher, my salary paid by parents fretful about Turkey’s future, hoping that their children too can one day move abroad.
The Peace Bride and I watch the sea claim discarded bottles and pieces of plastic from the shore. She tips my bottle to her lips and sends a mouthful of beer dribbling into the sand below her shimmering form.
I ask her something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. “The men you haunt, do they feel what you’re doing? Can they see you like I do?”
She gives a dismissive wave and says in that unplaceable accent: “It doesn’t matter. Allah sees all.”
We rise to bid good night to the families drinking tea, the young women whose faces flicker behind the embers of half-smoked cigarettes. The Peace Bride is on her way to a protest where people will stand behind banners and yell an ever-lengthening list of dead women’s names.
At the bus stop, the Peace Bride looks out at the sea of people and cars, the Roma girls selling roses in their patterned skirts, the red-faced drivers blaring their horns, the workers waiting for the bus to take them home to their families.
I look at her, pale and cold and hovering just above all this busyness, all this life, and feel my body flush with rage. “It’s not fair,” I say. “You should still be alive. You should all still be alive.”
The Peace Bride floats a little closer. I want to punch or kick or choke or push someone on her behalf. I want to grab her hand and run, away or toward what I’m not sure. She bends her face down toward mine and beckons for me to lean in.
“No justice, NO PEACE!” she yells in my ear.
I throw my arms around her shoulders, pressing her layers of tulle into my chest.
When I release her from the embrace, she smiles as warmly as a ghost can, and turns to board the bus. She waves at me from the window.
Then she sits down, already sharpening her elbows for the next fight.
Dilara Y is a Turkish American writer and university professor. She has worked as a case manager for unhoused youth and remains involved in political movements to end poverty and gender-based violence. She is working on a collection of interrelated short stories set in Istanbul and San Francisco.