Voodoo Children

Everything starts with a flash of lightning across the sky, the earliest hours of a misty smoky morning. Every single child in the city walks over from their bed to their steamed-up window and trace symmetrical figures, knowing the fact that they can erase it all with the back of their hand and look outside. As they shape figures and forms on the steamy window with their little fingers, the second flash of lightning shakes the infinite air. For a brief moment all of them are scared, but still, they don’t erase the whole steam of the window, still struggling with their first unconscious moments of this early morning. They have crust round their eyes, dirt under their fingernails, and still drunk of the tale they have seen in pictures the night before. So they decide to spread their palms out on their knees and wait for the third lightning.

The smoky windows between the children and the city: Paralyzed by the obscurity of the scenery, they erase the whole steam without waiting for the third lightning. For a few seconds everything is clear and crisp, and their wide-open eyes scan the whole image, as the steam would slowly show up again: 

Croaky ship horns // 

booming through the fog and heading towards East //

seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels //

tens of thousand identical apartment houses //

discolored by dust and rust //

strong black smoke rising from the chimneys //

sleepy sailors scrubbing their decks //

a crowd of people in identical black coats //

rushing somewhere along the dilapidated brick shells //

some kids spitting to each other //

the ferry and the wind changing their direction //

the smoke rising from the funnel //

gliding and swirling over the Bosphorus like Aladdin’s carpet //

the gravestones of forgotten cemeteries //

slowly sinking under the aged earth and vanishing for good as if they were never born and died //

a dry rain of millions of tiny black particles with the smell of burnt minerals //

empty-ramshackle wooden houses and the semi-darkness of the bleak houses //

twisted cobblestone streets and the rush of steam pouring up from the pavements //

leafless trees trembling here and there //

and street-cats sitting on wharfs waiting for the fishermen.

An exquisitely tranquil period of the city: A brief moment of standing still before the third lightning. A tremendous clap of thunder and a rain that pour down without mercy. Everybody wakes up.