Propinquity of the Green Castle
Julia had insisted on the picnic. Mario had no say in the matter. The grounds were well-groomed, lush and green. She spread a red cloth with a pattern of small black flowers, opened the picnic basket and removed from it a dark wine bottle and a small but laden charcuterie board. Her lavender garments contrasted with it and the surrounding greens in an aesthetically pleasing manner. The happiness of life depends upon little things like this. Mario ate a wedge of cheese that had started sweating in the sunshine. Then he started sweating. It was warm, but not unseasonably. Julia uncorked the wine bottle and poured him a glass. He sipped it, his lips convulsing to a pucker.
“It’s a Zinfandel,” she said.
Mario nodded, moving his mouth to resolve the acute astringency. His head swirled. The green castle in the distance looked toylike and harmless. He wondered what was going on there. He smoothed his black cloak with the flats of his hands and thumbed his thick black eyebrows. He should have dressed more suitably. He glanced at the castle. Very little is needed to make a happy life, he thought. Each day provides its own sweetness, its own reward. But sometimes you have to urge things along, juice the pace. He abruptly stood up.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Do you want to fly a kite?”
She reared her head. “A what?”
“A kite, a kite.”
“Did you bring a kite?”
“Take my hand,” he said.
Julia hesitated, but when he insisted she took his hand. He gripped it tightly and began to jog around the grounds, pulling her along, her shoes thudding over the sod. She looked confused, but didn’t resist. They picked up speed.
“When I say jump, jump high!” Mario shouted.
“I can’t jump that high!” she cried.
“Believe me, you can!”
They continued running briskly around the grounds. Mario ran with his face forward, teeth bared in a wine-tinged smile, cloak flapping. Julia looked stunned, undone, her eyes saucer-like.
After a few minutes of running—she pink-cheeked and panting, he sweating profusely—Mario shouted, “Jump!”
To Julia’s surprise, her feet lifted off the ground and fluttered under her as though made of crepe paper. Then they floated up, legs angling to the sky. Mario held her hand firmly as she floated above him but fixed his gaze on the green castle. What did he perceive there? What was it? Teeth clenched, chin raised, he started running toward the castle, still holding Julia’s hand, her body fluttering above him—a languid, lavender flutter.
It’s likely that an onlooker from the castle would have witnessed something altogether different.
The Mushrooms
Pirlo pancakes his face brick-red, dons his porkpie hat, and pulls on his mud boots. Then he grabs his violin and bow. “Back soon!” he cries to his mother, resting in the backroom on her screened bed.
“Bring back mushrooms!” she cries.
“If I find them I will,” he says.
“Just find them!”
Sometimes Pirlo resents his mother. He resents her to the point of hatred, where he imagines thrashing her, or bludgeoning her to death. He dislikes himself when this happens. He has trouble looking at himself in the mirror. But it is a real thing and he must respect it. He walks to the miniature goat path and sits on a green bench. He strokes a few notes on the violin with his bow. Immediately a crow touches down beside him. “Hello, Maldini,” he says to the crow. He has named it Maldini, after his father, who died in the war. The crow caws and hops around as Pirlo plays a few random notes with a sweet sound. Maldini likes it.
The pale blues and grays of twilight darken to indigo. What a precious privilege to be alive, Pirlo thinks opening his nostrils and taking a slow, deep breath. The evening air gives him the tingles. Then he thinks he hears his mother calling. Is she calling? Yes, she is. He sighs and stands up from the bench. He leaves the violin on it. Then he opens up his leather side-satchel and starts to walk into the forested area at the end of the property. Maldini follows, hopping along beside him and making little crow grunts and whistles.
“You can fly,” Pirlo says. “I don’t mind that you can fly, Maldini. I respect you for it. I wish I could fly, but this is not a possibility for me. Perhaps the happiness of your life depends upon the ability to fly, as the happiness of mine depends on finding mushrooms.”
Maldini bobs his head and caws. He understands. Without further ado he leads Pirlo to a bunch of white mushrooms by a rotting log. Pirlo smiles with elation. What a score! His father taught him all about mushrooms. If you spot any red in them assume they are poisonous. He stares at the mushrooms for a long time. He glances at Maldini, looking on keenly. Finally, he says, “These ones look okay.” He fills his satchel and heads back. Maldini follows.
At the bench Pirlo grabs his violin and stands there for a moment. It is not death one should fear, he reflects. But if not death, then what? He glances at the well-worn violin, with all its nicks and scrapes. It has stood him well. And it will provide for him in the future. And though the stars speckle the sky prettily and nightingales sing their sweet song, he is in no mood to play now. Can he hear his mother? He shuts his eyes and squeezes them tight. He can’t hear her. Or can he? Her voice is always in his ears, even when he is sleeping. I’ll be there soon, Ma. I’ll be there shortly. With a mess of beautiful mushrooms. Just give me a minute. Ma.
Pirlo sighs. The moon shines like a spotlight. Maldini looks made of polished onyx, the jewels of his eyes cruelly glittering.
All That You Are
Capretto didn’t believe in faeries. That is, before he got married he didn’t believe in them. A devil-red one floated overhead now in a state of suspended gesture, a little simper playing about its face, small clouds slipping by it. Capretto’s wife Mafalda had summoned it for their tenth anniversary. She had a number of faery friends who were always doing her favours. She said they were a blessing on their lives, but Capretto could not care less about these fussy creatures. Any magic they possessed only manifested itself in stingy drips and drabs. They never delivered the goods entire, the total show. They never exerted more energy than was necessary to trick their human contacts into letting their nonsense slide.
Hiding his indifference to the faery, Capretto embraced his wife vigorously in their yard by the fuchsia tree. He stroked her shoulder and planted his muzzle into her neck cavity.
“Your breath, dear,” Mafalda said, averting her face.
“Sorry,” he said. “I ate an onion this morning.”
“You eat them like apples.”
“And how are they supposed to be eaten?”
She didn’t want to argue with him this morning. Yesterday they’d argued about him eating her tulips. “Was not!” he protested. But she saw him munching them from a vase on the kitchen table with an unnatural gleam in his eyes. Anyway, exhausting. The happiness of life depended on the quality of discourse, yes, but also on compromise and good manners. Even love couldn’t overcome a lack of these qualities. Fortunately, good and cheerful things existed on the world to offset the negatives. She looked up and waved at the red faery who smiled and waved back.
“He’s so high up there,” she said, screening her eyes with her flattened hand.
“So it’s a male, this one?” Capretto said. “How can you tell?”
“Oh, don’t be silly. That’s Fabrizio. He’s a real character. He’s going to do one big thing for me today. He promised. He’s just waiting for my signal.”
“What’s he going to do?”
Mafalda closed and opened her eyes. “You’ll see.”
Capretto followed her back to the house. He loved his wife, but her humanity often angered him. He saw it as a character flaw, if not a crippling weakness. He had tried to explain this one evening over beers to his friend Giacomo, a full-blooded goat, but he wasn’t sympathetic. He didn’t like humans. He thought they smelled horrible. “That’s the least of it,” he’d say. “They also stink, behaviorally speaking, as fellow occupants of this planet.” But Capretto always steered Giacomo away from this line of talk. It could lead to trouble. You never knew who was leaning in with an ear. Now he wished he was with Giacomo so he could could ask him what he thought of faeries, if he considered them as useless as he did, as absurd as he did.
“You’re frowning,” Mafalda said. “Why are you frowning?”
“I’m not frowning,” Capretto said, standing at the kitchen window. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. For god sake, can’t a person think anymore?” He moved his mouth in pseudo-disgust and stomped the floor. Mafalda had replaced the ingested red and white tulips in the vase on the table with tantalizingly vibrant yellow ones. Mafalda thinned her eyes at him. He cleared his throat and asked, “So what’s this special thing your faery friend is going to do?”
“Only if you want,” she said. “He’ll do it only if you want.”
Capretto winced at the sound of this. And it didn’t take him long to figure out what she Mafalda up her sleeve. She wanted him fully transmogrified! She wanted him to go one hundred percent! Yes, they had talked about it. If they planned children, wouldn’t it be better if both parents were one hundred percent and so on, this sort of thing. That’s what Mafalda had posited. That he should transition to fullness for the sake of these hypothetical future generations. He found the idea laughable. He asked her why she didn’t go half-and-half and let the faery do his business on her? Wouldn’t that amount to the same thing? No, she’d said. It was a technical impossibility. The faeries could only perform the transformation on him.
“What if I need more time to think about it?” he said. “It’s no small thing, Mafalda.”
“I know, but it’s for the best, I think.”
Indeed, it was no small thing. Mafalda was making an ultimate ask. Was he prepared to commit?
“At dawn, birds can do nothing but sing,” he said.
Mafalda glared at him. “How’s that?”
“At dawn, birds can do nothing but sing.”
Exasperated, she shook her head and went back out.
Capretto stood at the kitchen window and watched her converse with the faery—what was his name again? Didn’t matter. What could she be telling him? That her half-human husband was a deadbeat and a bore? And would it have been that bad in the end? Being fully human? He thought about it as he watched Mafalda waving at the faery. She looked so earnest it made him glance over at the trembling yellow tulips on the table.
Vanities
One night Mirella could not sleep. She tossed and turned and finally got out of bed. She went out to the courtyard in her nightgown. The night air cooled her face and smelled sweetly of the nearby meadow. She walked to the stables. Halfway there she realized she was barefoot. She smiled. No worries. Her smile lingered. She chose the red pony, Rodolfo. She smoothed his mane and cooed to him. He nickered. She bridled him and took him out to the meadow.
They rode over the sighing grasses and flowers, the candelabra of the sky illuminating their way. “That a boy,” she said to Rodolfo. He smoothly trotted around the meadow. They rode past the fragrant orange tree and the red rooster Antonio, patrolling his perimeter. “Hallo, Antonio!” Mirella cried. “Hallo!” Antonio paid her no heed, bobbing his flared red head and poking about the chicken wire fence. Weasels lurked. Antonio made quick dispatch of weasels when he managed to run them down or root them out of their holes and hiding places. Mirella admired Antonio, but at the same time she thought he would make a good soup when his life ended. It was well known that old roosters made the best soup.
Rodolfo galloped around the meadow, kicking up grasses and little blue flowers. Mirella let the pony do all the work, making herself light on him, softly squeezing together her thighs and gently holding the reins. She made chucking sounds, but more out of habit than because they were necessary. This was a lovely moment she would not soon forget. Moments like this defined a good life, made for fond memories. Glassy-eyed and panting rhythmically, Rodolfo trotted smoothly without breaking gait once. They rode past the orange tree again and Mirella opened her nostrils and sighed.
They rode past the dusky villa where votary candles flickered in the cut glass windows. Others were awake. What would they say if they knew she was out there? Nothing good. Mirella pulled the reins right. Rodolfo leaned and turned away from the villa. Once again they rode past the orange tree and Antonio the rooster. Antonio disregarded them.
Mirella’s nightgown trailed behind her, merging with Rodolfo’s tail. His hooves thudded over the meadow. In the interplay of shadows, starlight, and candlelight from the villa, Mirella looked like she was on fire. Indeed she felt her body heating up as they continued circling the meadow. Rodolfo was sweating now, his chest heaving.
“I’m burning up,” Mirella thought. She glanced at her nightgown and screamed.
At this moment Antonio turned his beady but fierce gaze to Mirella and Rodolfo. He made a soft clucking sound. Mirella was screaming and shaking her head as they trotted around. What was the problem now? Always something with that human. Last week she fell into the well. Likely trying to gaze at her own reflection. Humans were vain that way. He felt bad for Rodolfo, the red pony. But not too bad. He had seen the pony gazing at his own reflection in the trough. He was guilty of vanity, too. And he wasn’t really red, in Antonio’s opinion. More like a maroon. I’m red, he thought, bobbing his head. I’m bloody red.
Salvatore Difalco writes from Toronto Canada. Instagram @ sal_difalco.