Flying Snow’s Reviews > The Bastard of Istanbul > Status Update

Auntie Banu opened a drawer, pulled out a huge, shiny knife, grabbed an onion lying on the counter, and cut it in half. She then cupped one half of the onion and pushed it toward Auntie Zeliha's nose.

"What are you doing?" Auntie Zeliha jumped in her chair.

"I am helping you to cry, my dear. [...] As much of a free spirit as you might be, even you need to shed a tear or two in the house of the dead."

To the one in the skies, this city must look like a scintillating pattern of speckled glows in all directions, like a firecracker going off amid thick darkness. Right now the urban pattern glowing here is in the hues of orange, ginger, and ochre. It is a configuration of sparkles, each dot a light lit by someone awake at this hour.

It is almost dawn, a short step away from that uncanny threshold between nighttime and a
daylight. It is the only time in which it is still possible to find solace in dreams and yet too late to build them anew.

Though. looks were potentially harmful, novels were all the more dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a moles night in the desert.