The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

This was a proverb; Stella would hear her grandmother say it often. “You make sure you are good, but you don’t worry whether other people are good or not because they must make their own peace with God.”

CHI TUTTO VO’, TUTTO PERDI,” Assunta reminded her daughters. A favorite of her many proverbs: whoever wants everything loses everything.

Stella had been told she loved her father and that her father loved her, but now that they’d met they were two differently sized strangers with nothing in common except Assunta.

As Antonio sat in the church’s second-to-last pew, he surveyed the hundreds of bowed dark heads and thought about his own funeral. Signor Scavetta was a man with a legacy, seven sons and two daughters, grand- and great-grandkids, and all of their friends mourned him now. Antonio understood, finally, what children were for.

never replied to the letter. In fact, he never wrote to Assunta again.

Purposefully decietful use of never. Constantly being told never again only to find that was a lie.

A house that one woman, Ros, had given to another woman, Assunta, subsumed by the patriarchy, snap! Just like that.

The moist air bore a sour tinge, like the smell that hits you when you uncover a rotten squash at the bottom of the vegetable pantry, only saltier.

SOME THINGS GET BETTER, some things don’t.

Her language comes back to her. Not always the right language.