The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

A fire is as good as the wood being burned; work is as good as the people who do it.

Modernity has stripped some of the magic out of the ways we live and die.

A woman who grows to adulthood is often a damaged thing;

This was the trouble with emigration—it dismantled the patriarchy. Because really, what did Assunta, or any woman, need a husband for, when she did every goddamn thing herself?

can you imagine the desperation they must have felt in order to step onto that boat knowing there was a chance they would not reach their destination? Most recently, these people have been emigrants trying to get into Italy, not emigrants trying to leave, and their passage is no easier or safer than that of their antecedents. Thousands of refugees from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Nigeria have died off the coasts of Italy in the last ten years, capsized, drowned, sunk in flames. History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.

You have to know exactly what you believe, so you can stick to it. Otherwise people will always try to cheat you or confuse you.”

The vagina is an organ of trauma, though, and as intense as this misery was, when it healed it did so completely.