Fires. Essays, Poems, Stories

around me slowly and listen, employing
    my entire body as the snail employs its body, relaxed, but alert. Amazing! Tonight is a milestone in my life. After tonight
    how can I ever go back to that other life? I keep my eyes on the stars, wave to them with my feelers. I hold on
    for hours, just resting. Still later, grief begins to settle around my heart in tiny drops. I remember my father is dead,
    and I am going away from this town soon. Forever. Goodbye, son, my father says. Toward morning, I climb down
    and wander back into the house.
    They are still waiting,
    fright splashed on their faces,
    as they meet my new eyes for the first time.
    STORIES
    DISTANCE
    She's in Milan for Christmas and wants to know what it was like when she was a kid. Always that on the rare occasions when he sees her.
    Tell me, she says. Tell me what it was like then. She sips Strega, waits, eyes him closely.
    She is a cool, slim, attractive girl, a survivor from top to bottom.
    That was a long time ago. That was twenty years ago, he says. They're in his apartment on the Via Fabroni near the Cascina Gardens.
    You can remember, she says. Go on, tell me.
    What do you want to hear? he asks. What can I tell you? I could tell you about something that happened when you were a baby. It involves you, he says. But only in a minor way.
    Tell me, she says. But first get us another drink, so you won't have to interrupt half way through.
    He comes back from the kitchen with drinks, settles into his chair, begins.
    They were kids themselves, but they were crazy in love, this eighteen-year-old boy and his seventeen-year-old girl friend when they married. Not all that long afterwards they had a daughter.
    The baby came along in late November during a severe cold spell that just happened to coincide with the peak of the waterfowl season in that part of the country. The boy loved to hunt, you see, that's part of it.
    The boy and girl, husband and wife now, father and mother, lived in a three-room apartment under a dentist's office. Each night they cleaned the upstairs office in exchange for their rent and utilities. In the summer they were expected to maintain the lawn and the flowers, and in winter the boy shoveled snow from the walks and spread rock salt on the pavement. The two kids, I'm
    telling you, were very much in love. On top of this they had great ambitions and they were wild dreamers. They were always talking about the things they were going to do and the places they were going to go.
    He gets up from his chair and looks out the window for a minute over the tile rooftops at the snow that falls steadily through the late afternoon light
    Tell the story, she says.
    The boy and girl slept in the bedroom, and the baby slept in a crib in the living room. You see, the baby was about three weeks old at this time and had only just begun to sleep through the night.
    One Saturday night, after finishing his work upstairs, the boy went into the dentist's private office, put his feet up on the desk, and called Carl Sutherland, an old hunting and fishing friend of his father's.
    Carl, he said when the man picked up the receiver. I'm a father. We had a baby girl.
    Congratulations, boy, Carl said. How is the wife?
    She's fine, Carl. The baby's fine, too, the boy said. Everybody's fine.
    That's good, Carl said. I'm glad to hear it. Well, you give my regards to the wife. If you called about going hunting, 111 tell you something. The geese are flying down there to beat the band. I don't think I've ever seen so many of them and I've been going for years. I shot five today. Two this morning and three this afternoon. I'm going back in the morning and you come along if you want to.
    I want to, the boy said. That's why I called.
    You be here at five-thirty sharp then and well go, Carl said. Bring lots of shells. Well get some shooting in all right. I'll see you in the morning.
    The boy liked Carl Sutherland. He'd been a friend of the boys father, who was dead now. After the father's death, maybe trying to replace a loss they both felt, the boy and Sutherland had started hunting together. Sutherland was a heavy-set, balding man who lived alone and was not given to casual talk. Once in a while, when they were together, the boy felt uncomfortable, wondered if he had said or done something wrong because he was not used to
    being around people who kept still for long periods of time. But when he did talk the older man was often opinionated, and frequently the boy didn't agree