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careening
sallow-complexioned
Pale, yellowish color (can even be brown)
He was a young man—very young—beautiful in the way of marble statues. Honey-colored hair curling around his ear, muscular neck, the whole thing. Like a teen idol. He said something in Italian, too fast for her to make out, and then she woke up.
She did like the game, though, still fished for potential lovers, but now it was catch and release. She’d be a flirtatious nun for as long as she could sustain it.
Direct apologies—admissions of occasional lapses in saintliness—were not in Benny’s wheelhouse.
It seemed to Anna that the concept of “vacation” was antithetical to the concept of “family.” Vacation required vacancy. The abandonment of all scraps of everyday life.
PENTIMENTO
Earlier traces of anitfher painting
Jenny Greenteeth,
The scream came just before dawn.
peevish,
Easily irritated
There was something comfortably eerie about Monteperso today,
As Mary cradled the dying Jesus, Anna could swear she could see her breathing.
Anna didn’t like it, if she was honest. Bit too real.
was torture of a different and therefore refreshing variety.
Anna balanced a paper bag of produce on her hip and grabbed the front door key from Dad, but something made her hesitate before turning the knob. A heaviness. An inner no.
She hadn’t wanted to elaborate in front of everybody else that this was what she’d felt was hidden in the landscape. Poison. Rot.
If you manage to out-Italian the Italians in your driving, Anna thought, you probably shouldn’t have a license in the first place.
Cornicello, Anna remembered, as they descended the tower in a careful, dizzy spiral. That was the name of the charm the old woman had offered her. It was meant to ward off the evil eye.
They were alike, Anna and her father, but often in the wrong ways. They were identical magnets, she thought, turned to repel.
Il malocchio, Anna realized. Jealousy. The evil eye. She should have been gifted a cornicello at birth.
“È qui,” he said, and blood spilled from his mouth.
A blurred figure, standing so close it could lower its chin to her neck and bite her.
Justin’s forehead crinkled when he frowned. It was weirdly attractive.
Please stop thirsting over your brother-in-law
Hot, moist air—and then it became solid. A wet slug. Sliding up her neck, to her ear. Licking her.
French exit,
Anna slammed the laptop shut and turned to see her nieces standing behind her, Mia clutching the orange cat.
KITTY!!!
Now she saw that their feet were bleeding. Not the soles. The beds of the toenails.
She remembered Christopher not smirking. Not talking. Only gasping like a banked fish.
“dobbiamo nutrire,”
La dama bianca. Ricca, potente. Vinaio. Infedele. Ossessiva. Colture avvelenate. Il figlio. Veleno, tutti avvelenati. Attacchi ai vivi. Allucinazione. Esorcismo. La chiave.
La chiave del male. La chiave del torre. Mi dispiace. Perdonami, perdonami, perdonami …
A dark, small figure. A child. Groaning. No. It was a convulsive sound. A grunt. And again. It’s hiccupping, Anna realized.
Anna nearly smiled, would have smiled, if she didn’t feel the thing smiling behind her. La Dama. Its teeth were exposed. She was sure of it.
staccato
Anna turned, and saw two things in the space of so many blinks: One, a little girl walking ahead of her dad down the sidewalk. Two, a movement above her in the sixth-floor corner window.
fug
Duolingo, wondering where she’d been, why she’d stopped studying Italian. That damn owl looked so disappointed in her.
She felt the tension growing around her now, not dissipating, but she was getting used to the feeling of constant dread, punctuated by jump scares. It lived everywhere in her body now.
La Dama Bianca indeed. La Dama Putrida.
“You’re lucky you can be out of it! You’re not the one it’s … fucking … piggybacked onto.”
she felt the air laughing around her, dancing merrily.
Anna succumbed to it, to her, her Lady in white sheets, as pleasure swept her and she knew what she wanted. Understand. Obey.
Control was antithetical to life. To be alive is to be battered about. To endure and adapt and keep stumbling onward despite it all.
“This is what most people spend their lives trying not to face. The pointlessness of it all. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold because there was never any center in the first place.”
“Sciolgo il tuo incantesimo. Il tuo nome è dimenticato. Il tuo lavora è dimenticato. Il tuo potere è andato.”
The corpse was soft and purpled, black on the bottom and seeping outward in a slow puddled creep. There was movement in his face, and Anna prepared for Christopher’s corpse to do as his ghost had done, to animate, reach for her, rage fueled, but then maggots crawled from his decaying lips, other insects following, and she realized what the confetti feeling all over her had been. Flies. On her eyes, in her nostrils, darting in and out of her mouth.
She bumped into Pietro the Uber driver, in Paris, of all places. He looked older, which suited him, but that cherub hair was still thick and curly.
