by Sarp Sozdinler

My mother called them the Party People and told me not to talk with them. I watched them from the privacy of our balcony. I once saw a topless girl flashing to the passersby through the window. Another time, a guy with a serious acne problem made out with another guy in the middle of the night. They all coughed like dying old men. Cops showed up occasionally. I hated the Party People. How they seemed at once content and happy. How they could go on for days on end without sleep. How they never wanted to be like me.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Masters Review, Pithead Chapel, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and Fractured Lit, among other journals. Their stories have been finalists for the Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Prize and the Passages North Waasnode Short Fiction Prize, and have been selected or nominated for several anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. They are currently at work on their first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.