Isabella, from Miransu

Literary Review, Fall, 2005 by Monica Sarsini

I lit the fire in my room. I did it secretly while the men were out working in the garage. Lighting a fire is their business, knowing how to lean on one knee, bend low over the terracotta pavement and look right into the grate, blowing air, making slow sounds. The handmade glass panes set into one of the two windows make a mirage of the landscape, scattered upright traffic cones flank the white road leading to the chapel, the string of telephone line disappears between one pole and then next, there's a lone, fat little bird up there contemplating the spreading leaves of the cabbage.

The bed in here is tall, I used to need help from my parents to climb up here when I was little. This was their room. Now we sleep here. When ray nieces visit they have this way of climbing up the stone stairs, standing at the door--we're a man and a woman but we aren't their mother and father--making little noises so that we'll notice them. I climb down from the mattress and go get them, we have to heave them by their arms to pull them up onto the bed, where they stretch out next to me, focused on sucking their thumbs, brushing one of their legs against mine or resting on my stomach, and watching him, he's prim, he brushes his hair back, sets a foot down on the floor and then goes to shave behind the wrought iron headboard, through the slats you can just make out his face, a predatory domestic. When I fall asleep at night and I'm not here, one of the little girl's faces begins to expand, it takes over the surfaces of the house, burrows into the walls, spreads out across the valley. She likes to walk and hold hands and tell you stories about what she sees. It's an inexhaustible subject matter when it's shared and can be told over and over again, until the impression stirred up fades away and leaves room for new enchantment. Everything we say comes to mean, by dint of being repeated, that our bond is fast, our encounters highlight the agreement that unites us, how we take seriously everything malformed about reality. A wound on my foot, a cut on her finger, these require many kisses, even over the Band-Aid circumscribing the injury. And, yes, once healed, this ritual is replayed, recalling what had been and what had caught our attention about the expanding glow of the moon, the sudden dark of a path, along our tenuous way toward the dream of waking. The other girl preens and slithers over the yellow leaves, she laughs and runs, and then takes off again, the entire slope of the hill is suffuse with her harmless little-girl will to be part of a world without a storyline, despite the fact that the owl insinuates frightening words into the sleep of the girl already there, unchangeable no matter her age. She runs to the side of anyone struck by a sharp phrase or denying stare, she reaches out her little hand and begins to unfurl the thread of a journey destined for solidarity. It's lovely up here on the bed. This isn't a bed like other beds, it's suspended in the middle of the room, between the two windows in the midst of the raspy calls of the deer and the swelling pouch of breath in the dark night.