The girl is trying her hardest to climb a tree and knock free a hive dripping with honey, but the tree is too smooth.

Emre hunches his shoulders over his small treasure to protect it from his supervisor’s gaze, then flips back to his place just as Black Mustafa is laughing at a girl he has snatched up from the nearby village. His supervisor is puttering around the office trying to get reports in early so everyone can go home before the riot police close the block. But Emre must keep shutting his book away in the desk drawer. Today, like any other day, while his colleagues file reports on various insurance claims, Emre is trying to finish reading his book about the brigand Black Mustafa. Ece, young and thin with limbs like a sparrow’s legs, is just finishing high school. Necla, the middle, is dark, much darker than the others, with teeth that gleam like mother-of-pearl. Adalet, the oldest, is tall, tall as a tree, with lips that can’t help themselves from frowning. Here is a man named Emre who lives in the Kasımpaşa neighborhood of Istanbul in a small apartment with two bedrooms-one for him and his wife, Mirhiye, and the other for his three grown daughters, Adalet, Necla, and Ece. The following is the opening section of a short story entitled “Three Parts in Which Emre Kills His Daughters” from Kenan Orhan’s short story collection I Am My Country: And Other Stories, out Apfrom Random House.

Orhan received his MFA from Emerson College and lives in Kansas City. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, The Common, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in. Orhan is a Turkish American writer and a recipient of the O. The following is a story from Kenan Orhan's I Am My Country.

Wives and daughters book