No Mercy
Flash Fiction February - Day 14 - Romance
The ferry from Karaköy to Üsküdar still costs next to nothing, still smells faintly of diesel and someone’s forgotten simit, still slices the Bosphorus like a dull knife through silk. Ten years to the day, and the water hasn’t changed its mind about reflecting minarets or the occasional gull’s indifferent stare.
He had practiced the gesture in his head so many times it felt rehearsed, almost liturgical: arrive at dawn, buy the flower from the same vendor who sold him that one ten years ago near the Galata Bridge (the man is gone now, replaced by a younger cousin who nods without recognition), walk the pier, board the 7:40, the same one he caught that day morning ten years ago, wait until the boat is midway across, then let the rose fall. A quiet punctuation mark on a sentence no one else ever read.
He stands at the rail near the stern, dew still clinging to the petals of the single red rose like small confessions. He doesn’t notice her at first. She’s on the starboard side, half-hidden by a cluster of schoolgirls in navy uniforms, her hair shorter now, streaked with silver that catches the morning light like contrails. She wears the same style of scarf she did back then—loose, defiant, the kind that says I know exactly how it looks when the wind takes it. In her hand: another rose, white this time, stem wrapped in a scrap of newspaper.
She sees him before he sees her.
The ferry lurches slightly as it clears the wake of a passing tanker. He lifts the red rose, hesitates—always the lawyer in him, weighing the symbolism against the ridiculousness—then extends his arm over the rail.
“Is that for me?”
The voice is the same, low and amused, the faint Midwestern lilt that once made him laugh when she tried to pronounce rakı. He turns so fast the rose nearly slips from his fingers.
She’s smiling the way people smile when they’ve rehearsed the moment in secret for years and are suddenly embarrassed by how perfectly it’s arriving.
He lowers his arm. “You kept the scarf.”
She touches the fabric at her throat. “It’s become a talisman. Bad luck to throw it away.”
“I thought you were a mirage. Spent the first year googling variations of your name. Nothing. Then I gave up and decided you were probably a spy. Or married to a diplomat. Or dead in a glamorous way.”
“None of the above. Just scared.” She shrugs, the old self-deprecating lift of one shoulder. “I was leaving the next morning. You were staying another week. I wrote my real number on a napkin, then panicked and wrote a fake one instead. Threw the real one in the trash at the hotel. Romantic, right?”
“Devastatingly practical.”
The ferry horn gives a low moan. They’re almost at Üsküdar now; the Asian shore is sharpening into mosques and fish restaurants and the smell of frying mussels.
She steps closer. “I came to throw this overboard.” She holds up the white rose. “Same pier, same time. Figured if the universe was going to let me vanish once, it owed me a do-over.”
He looks at the red rose, then at her white one. “Shall we?”
They lean over the rail together. The water is the color of tarnished mercury, flecked with light.
She drops the white rose first.
It lands petal-up, dignified, and begins drifting east.
He waits half a beat—long enough to feel the old fear try to surface—then releases the red.
For several seconds the current does what currents do. The roses separate cleanly. Red to the west. White to the east. Continental.
Neither speaks.
He feels the distance like a verdict.
The delayed wake from the passing tanker rolls through, subtle but decisive. The water shifts its argument. The red hesitates, pivots. The white curves back, not dramatically, not magically. The stems touch. Drift apart. Touch again. They begin a small, imperfect orbit.
She exhales. “This city doesn’t let people go easily.”
“No,” he says. “It waits.”
Behind them, Istanbul roars and bargains and sells tea and ignores them entirely—which is exactly how it performs its quietest miracles.
“I’m not leaving tomorrow,” she says. “Two weeks. No ticket yet.”
He studies her the way he didn’t dare to ten years ago. A beat. “I hated you,” he adds, not as an accusation but as accounting. “For a while.”
“I hated myself longer.”
No apology can refund a decade. There is only choice.
“Breakfast?” she says. “There’s a place near the pier that does menemen with extra peppers. No mercy.”
He almost smiles. “No mercy.”
They step off the 7:40 into the salt-and-spice morning of Üsküdar. The call to prayer drifts above traffic and clinking glasses. Vendors argue. Cats pretend ownership. Behind them, two roses continue their negotiated orbit on the Bosphorus—drifting apart, correcting, refusing to sink.
The strait keeps dividing continents the way it always has. It offers no guarantees. It remembers nothing officially. But sometimes, between Europe and Asia, between fear and nerve, it adjusts the current just enough.
Ten years late.
Right on time.