The Turkish language has a dedicated tense, sometimes called the “heard past,” for events that one has been told about but hasn’t witnessed. We were both there when it happened, along with our mom, but I was too young to remember. One night in August of 1999, on a summer trip back to Ankara, our dad was murdered. But there was another encounter with death that I didn’t dare ask about, an untold story that involved the two of us. I read G questions from a how-to handout on oral history, relishing the excuse to pry. The assignment was to interview relatives and retell a “family legend.” G’s tale, which she repeated often, hinted at a strange, wondrous chapter of our past, before our parents immigrated to the United States and had me. I wrote my own essay about the chick many years later, for a high-school English class. In a school essay, my sister described this experience as her “first confrontation with death.” But he soon grew into a rooster, shedding feathers and shitting on the furniture, so our grandfather had a housekeeper take him home to kill for dinner. G would place him on her shoulder and listen to him cheep into her ear. The bird had a pale-yellow coat and tiny, vigilant eyes. When my older sister, G, was a child, she bought a pet chick from a street vender near our family’s home in Ankara, Turkey.
