Omi

Omi was born into a Late Chalcolithic village on the high plateau near the wooded slopes above the Kızılırmak bend, where households answered to elders and kin more than to any distant ruler. His family traded with Semitic-speaking merchants from the south, and Tari knew enough of their tongue to haggle over copper and obsidian. In their house the dead of the line were treated as present: names spoken at the hearth, food set aside, small requests made for protection.

He arrived in the cold season, his mother Luma squatting on packed earth beside the firepit while Haru, his father’s mother, steadied her shoulders and murmured the household’s ancestor names. When the cord was cut, Haru rubbed Omi with warm fat and wrapped him in a woven cloth from Luma’s stores. Danu, the grandfather, placed a pinch of flour and a drop of sour beer at the edge of the hearthstone for the family dead.

Tari, Omi’s father, left when the spring paths opened, taking a donkey load of yarn and cured hides toward larger settlements. During his absences, Luma ground grain at dawn, skimmed milk, and kept Omi close, nursing between tasks. Haru carried him while checking storage jars and watching the small stock. Suni, Tari’s brother, helped manage the animals and sometimes held Omi on his knee while sharpening flint blades by the doorway. When Omi began to babble and crawl, Danu marked the new moon with a bowl of porridge set by the threshold for an ancestor whose grave lay beyond the houses.

In the second summer of Omi’s life, he fell into a sharp fever. Mara, the village midwife, washed him and smoked the room with burning juniper, but the fever held. Omi died in mid-summer. They laid him in a small pit at the edge of the household’s burial ground, wrapped in cloth, with a bead and a pinch of grain set by his hands.