042. Lost. Tinfoil Looks Like That

The previous a draft--ten minutes done at five-thirty AM. This one, with rather more time, this morning. CL's contest. Thank you, Snoink. On this, I still feel as if I'm writing blind though.

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Sometimes, Bellezza hummed.

Fleeting melody—they were the sounds of lackadays whistling under bullets’ whirr; of children chanting rhymes and lullabies; of the mockingbird at dusk. Wide lips pursed, she stared at paving stones and hummed. But she tried not to recall the tunes. War had its own music, and it had gotten inexorably wound up with hers—like heartbeats against barbed wire.

‘And I don’t wanna fall in love

I don’t wanna hurt me, guv’

I don’t wanna fall in love…’

Little Teresa told her heart holes only came out of bullet holes. She had illustrated it—charcoal and crayon on a scrap of mama’s note paper. In the far left corner, the stationer had printed Pax Christi.

Bellezza hummed. No one fell in love in Li’Italy—the city couldn’t hold it. It loved like its little girls, dirt under their fingernails picking pockets, pulling bank notes out against ribs, hips quashed back against day-old, maggot war dead. It loved like the young men, knotted in their barbed wire, who loved the choked, gagging feeling in their gut, or the pained shine of their rifle barrel.

Whimsical, Teresa’s next scribble was a crooked heart, wired up like a lightbulb.

‘Light bulb’s don’t work that way,’ Bellezza told her.

‘It’s a heart with lights,’ said Teresa, ‘It’s got wires like mami’s bra, to keep her heart in.’

‘Heart’s don’t light up.’

‘Yes,’ said Teresa, earnestly, ‘Look.’

So the city had wired hearts then. Like lightbulbs, wired wrong, they couldn’t light up.

Bellezza lay on the roof, the sun searing through her eyelids, daylight [noon] sketching freckles on her nose. Gunshot rhythms echoed up against the leaning flats, tenement cinderblock and adobe mud ratcheting sound to the sky. And she wandered the narrow streets, tracing bullet holes in the long walls with smudged fingers. And she took Teresina to the edge of the flats and looked down into the gut of the trench and said look, that’s barbed wire.

With curious grey eyes, Teresa followed the roots and water rivulets, carved into the sides of the ditch. She said, ‘There’s veins in them.’

While Teresa drew pink things with electricity and wires winding through them, Bellezza hummed and danced a waltz. The boys in love with rifle butts and barrels, with pain in their stomachs, waved and called out.

And Bellezza spat on them, and giggled—the sun behind her a halo.

The lost wandered through the city sometimes. Ghost folk, refugees and half-men with pieces missing—arms, faces, teeth, hands. Usually, mama found them in the window’s barbed wire. Everyone had barbed windows. Sometimes, they were in the bar with their heads on the sticky tables. Sometimes they stumbled through and out the other side—just shades passing through; wires strung through a faded, graying heart.

Until Gaetano sauntered in, limp daring, lazy grin and bent up shoulders slouched sideways in his coat. He stopped at Bellezza’s house, and got his coat cuff caught in the window’s wire, and his heart sketched up by Teresa as tinfoil with something red peering out of the inside.

Freed, he disappeared into the alleys. The next day, he was back, wrist wrapped in dirty linen. He stood beneath the second window until Bellezza looked out, her freckled face wan, lips wide unpursed.

He said, I love you.

Bellezza tore her skirts that night, dashing through barbed wire. She lost her shoes in rivulet mud; and she hummed snatches of lullabies. Chopin—the mad trill of piano keys in Etude in G flat major that the barboy could play on the shattered baby-grand. Nursery rhymes with dirges for melody.

The next day, Gaetano found her on Signora Gravi’s roof. He peered over the lip of the flat tiling, frayed hair brittle over green eyes. I love you, he told her.

She stopped humming, and slept until he could hold on no longer, and slid back on to the awning and dropped into the street.

Teresa clung to her at dinner, asking, asking, asking. Can you wire up a heart? Look, this one’s quashed. She had another crayon-smeared sketch. This one’s quashed. Can you wire it like the net scaping? Can it get wired like a light bulb?

No, Bellezza told her, not even light bulb’s work that way. It’s just squashed up. It means it’s dead.

In the morning, Gaetano found her on the shelf above the trenches. And she laughed, smiled with eyes like sunset. She played games, and asked him to whistle his marching songs. Earnestly, she told him he had a silly, pretty head. She told him things that meant the world, but they were wired up words, and in her mind, she heard them like piano keys, untuned. Barboy playing a waltz that sounded like a dirge.

He whistled every morning to wake her. Every morning, she peered through barbed wire to his widening smile, the cinderblock lined up behind him, already dusky at dawn.

‘Exchange hearts,’ he asked her on the roof, ‘I love you.’

And it seemed a novel sort of idea, but hardly fair.

And so she crushed his heart—like tinfoil, Teresina’s sketch—and strung barbed wire words through it; made him think of bullet holes and how he got his limp. Purposeful, oblivious—he couldn’t have what she didn’t.

‘I don’t wanna be in love

don’t wanna hurt me, guv’

don’t wanna be in love…’

She hummed from the roof, gazing down at his sideways shoulder more and how his other seemed broken as it; his wan face dead-white, hand clutched in his jacket against his heart.

I love you, he told her.

But she knew what love was; and it couldn’t be wired up; and light bulb’s didn’t work, shattered and strung with electrical tape. And Teresa sketched her a piece of coal, with penciled triangles strewn about it and asked her, asked, asked.

Is it dead when it looks like that?