All night long I’ve been cruising the dimly lit streets of West Philly. Nearing the sunup, I stop a mother and son up over the dumpsters at 8^th and Wolf, their faces bathed in the red-blue lights of the police car. She demands to know what it’s that gave her away but my eyes are fixed on this tendril of ivy slithering across the pavement just behind her son, sprawling toward where the sun spills its early taupe over the low-slung buildings. My stepdad and I used to weed out the ivy festooning all over the side of our house, inching closer toward the front porch every day, every minute, determined, diligent as if out on a secret mission. That was the house I was born in and soon had to get evicted from after the cops took Mom away for her daily consumption of meth and crack and everything else in between. It was my stepdad who took me away to my grandparents’ farmhouse up in Ardmore, never to be seen again. Today, the boy looks over at her mother in the same way I once did look at Mom, edgy, jittery, his hands buried in his hoodie pockets and fumbling with what I take from its bulging tip to be a switchblade. I don’t say anything about it and in return he doesn’t say anything about the cuffs I put on her mother’s wrists. He doesn’t say anything about her gauzy arms blotched all over with marks big or small. He doesn’t say anything about the syrupy smell wafting off her in sickly threads. What I want to do is pull him close from over the curb and say Look, then avert his attention to the arms of the ivy stretching out and over all around us to teach him a few tricks on how to chop the heads off all this unwanted growth before it’s too late, how to burn the sprouting seeds before they could bite back, before they could invade everywhere. He would watch me with close interest and try to memorize every word I uttered in the same way I once did my stepdad’s, his glasses glinting like a cyclops under the dawning sun, searching for another kind of way out. I would tell him I’m doing it all to save him, to save myself, that nothing is lost forever. That the eye sees everything, remembers everything. That it would soon begin to rain.

– Sarp Sozdinler