Frogs, Fruits and Loads

We shared a single bed, which surprised me, given Kemal’s fear of being outed. After long days picking cherries and walnuts from the orchard, or overripe apricots from the trees that lined the neighborhood streets, we’d collapse sweaty and exhausted onto each other – though I still couldn’t manage to sleep. For years, I’d been suffering from sleep paralysis so severe I often found it better to stay awake all night. I’d seen several doctors in the UK, and none of them had been able to do anything. After a few sleepless nights, Kemal suggested we visit the local witch doctor.

The journey took an hour on rough backroads. Like Kemal’s town, this one was full of half-built houses and a cinderblock mosque. As we joined a queue outside the witch’s house, Kemal explained that doctors are too expensive for locals, so most people rely on these healers.

The witch was short and shriveled with a mischievous air – a bit like Kemal’s grandma. Her tits hung down to the waistband of her harem pants. Amulets and evil eyes hung on the wall, and a Turkish oil wrestling match played on a TV in the background. She read coffee grounds in a cup and told me something about having been in a “life-changing” car accident, which wasn’t true. Kemal translated, and told me that the witch, who came from a nomadic tribe, kept mixing up her verb tenses. She proceeded to dip a ladle into a pot of molten lead bubbling on the hearth. The ladle glowed like a small red planet as it orbited my head. Finally, she cast its contents into a bucket of ice water, which erupted in billows of noxious steam. When the clouds settled, we looked down into the bucket at strangely gnarled shapes that she explained were the poisons being drawn out of my body. As we paid, she told me to tape a coin to the sole of my shoe to ensure I’d always stay on top of my finances.

The mood turned tensed on the drive back. The car got pretty beat up from the trip, and Kemal was nervous his dad would be upset. I kept thinking about what the witch had said about a car crash – what if she used the past tense but had really meant the future? – when suddenly we screeched to a halt. Hundreds of frogs sat motionless on the road in front of us. Maybe it was where we had just come from, but the scene seemed prophetic, Biblical. Kemal was fuming. We were already late. He rushed out and started moving the frogs by hand, one by one, from the road to the shoulder. Eventually enough of them got the message and hopped off, so we were able to continue the trip.

By sunset we were back at the farm. I asked Kemal to go for a walk in the cherry orchard. He was still tense. I’d been wanting to ask him if he planned to leave London someday and settle permanently on his family’s property, and if so, how he felt about returning to a place where he wasn’t out. But before I could, he pulled down my shorts and pushed me onto the ground. The full weight of his muscles pressed me down and I tasted the damp earth. He fucked me hard and fast, squeezing my neck in the crook of his elbow. I struggled to breathe. It couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes before he came inside me with a low growl. After he finished, he stood, but my body lay there limp. I didn’t turn my head, but heard the sound of his zipper, then his belt buckle. ‘Be ready for dinner in five,’ he said, and walked away.

When I finally got up, I could just make out Kemal’s silhouette at the end of the orchard where he was talking to his mum. Before heading back to the house, I brushed the soil off my filthy clothes, squatted over a strawberry patch, and pushed out his load. His cum was a horny reminder of our encounter, which I still hadn’t fully processed, and I wondered if it would make good fertilizer.

I never had sleep paralysis again.