Tartufo

by Kira Jane Buxton

big city allows you to be anonymous, to slink among the streetlights, endlessly reinventing yourself under storefronts and neon signs. But in a tiny tight-knit village—try as you might—you can never hide from who you are.

It’s as she’s always seen it: the cruelest people have the comfort of money and the good-hearted have none. The

Aria lifts her nose, and the whole world simultaneously expands and distills. A drama unfurls before her. Scents rise and swirl, bullied around by a light breeze. Some hover like small clouds above stones. There are the tentacled and tailed. A few sing. Some are like small poems. Many are ephemeral, quick as a cough. There are those that snarl, some snicker. Animal spoors trail with confidence like the smoke of a cigar. Some frolic like a dragonfly drizzling itself across a blue summer sky. Others haunt fallen leaves. They are bright and alive, these auras. They speak of sagas. Of sex. Birth. Battles. Death.

Love is a truffle. Delicate. A rarity that takes time to cultivate. A recipe of the right relationships. Sometimes with a too-short shelf life, he thinks. It is an erotic entanglement, an alchemy of chemistry and a seduction of the senses.

maybe not everything is a problem to solve or a creature to be cultivated. When we embrace the mysterious, we relinquish our chokehold on control and accept that there is more to life than we can see and know. Isn’t that refreshing?”

hate this parade, this superficial delusion of what our village is, of what Italy is! A fever dream of Armani, Ferrari, and Aperol, when, in reality, none of us can afford those things. We struggle and suffocate under a corrupt parliament and politics, sky-high taxation, population implosion, unemployment and poverty, and I’m tired of the poetic lie that we are solely a land of art and cuisine and culture. We are more complex than a villa-with-a-view-and-a-pool holiday! The truffle is who we are—not sitting on a velvet pillow in a castle, but a force of nature finding its way out of the dirt.”