Tartufo

by Kira Jane Buxton

And a quiet calamity occurs. A truth pops up in front of her, as if plucked from a patch of soil. She is realizing, standing here in front of matching cardigans and a wheelchair hosting bright-yellow trousers and even Duccio’s bitter aperitivo of a scowl, that she is in love with these humans. Twins Valentina and Rosa, who braided her hair and bought her gelato every summer she spent here, a lost little slip of a thing. Stefano, who has traded the wheels of an automobile for those of a chair, who used to ferry her around in his Fiat Panda. Even disgraced Duccio, when he was trusted to be the village postman and he would bring her cherished horse magazines on his postal rounds, going out of his way and adding an extra hour to his route so that she had something to read and a break from pretending Nonna Amara’s tree-planting shovel was a stallion. Benedetto, the gentle grocer, a green bean of a man who turned a blind eye to her rebellious phase, teenage fingers foxily plucking contraband from his shelves like fat figs. She thinks of Giuseppina, who brought her tiny floral dresses, danced with her in the piazza on warm summer nights, fireflies strobing across the hillside like fairies. Giuseppina, who channeled the most ferocious of Leon’s guard geese when Delizia—younger, wilder—met that oily man at the village. When young Delizia had attempted to inoculate herself with shots of vodka, and that man—a sly-eyed stoat who smelled of cherry tobacco and trout—had tried to take he...