Toast, Smoke, and Suspicion
In a Turkish town blanketed by cannabis smoke, reality bends in the strangest ways.
For 60 years, Şule Kaya had lived on the same corner in the dusty town of Lice.
She was 81 now—a widow, mother of four, grandmother to eight—and not the type to complain. Not about her knees, not about the slow mail, not even when the electricity cut out every other week.
But this—this was something else entirely.
It began the moment the smoke rolled in. The heavy, sour-sweet air settled over the neighborhood like a wet blanket. She shuffled from room to room with a roll of tape and a stack of old Cumhuriyet pages, crouching stiffly to seal vents and wedge rags beneath the doors. Still, the smell slipped through. She couldn’t pray without feeling dizzy. She walked into the kitchen to boil tea and forgot why she came.
Her eyes fell on the toaster.
It was an old Soviet-era relic, a wedding gift from her late husband’s cousin in Kars. She hadn’t used it in years, but today she felt the urge to try. Pushed two slices of village bread in and pressed the knob. The toaster clicked and began humming for a minute. With a resonant ding, it ejected the bread a little too eagerly, nudging one slice onto the counter and the other onto the floor.
Şule stared at it, looking at the crumbs on the countertop. It dinged again, this time without her touching anything.
“Yeter artık,” she muttered. Enough.
She dragged a chair over and sat down in front of it, folded her arms and gave the toaster a look she usually reserved for misbehaving children.
The toaster dinged again. She leaned in slowly and muttered: “Sen kimsin?” Who are you.
As the sky began to fade, her grandson Murat showed up with groceries. He found her mid-interrogation, headscarf slightly askew, holding her sandal like a hammer.
“Babaanne?” he asked cautiously.
She turned slowly. “This thing has been mocking me all day.”
Murat opened the window. The air still smelled like burnt oregano and wet soil. Years of secretly smoking behind the chicken coop had given him more tolerance than most; he barely noticed it now.
He looked at the toaster, then at her.
“It’s just old,” he said gently.
She shook her head. “No. It’s different. I think... I think it knows I’m confused.”
He didn’t argue. Just unplugged it and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll bring you a new one.”
The next day, Şule told the neighbor’s wife she’d seen her curtains move even though the windows were shut. And that her cat had started purring in Kurdish.
No one mocked each other. Everyone in Lice had their own weird story that day.
Later, local police issued a statement apologizing for the incident, explaining that over 20 tons of confiscated cannabis had been burned just outside town as part of a disposal operation—unaware that the smoke would drift in and “cause community-wide discomfort.”
Şule took the new toaster Murat brought, eyed it for a long moment, then slid it straight into the cupboard. “I like my bread a little stale,” she said. “Less trouble that way.”
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