[408 words]
What I’ve Begun To Forget
Phone numbers. Addresses. The price of a postage stamp, an envelope, postcards, a letter home, the shiny red mailboxes: Poste Italiane. My mother’s voice. The shape, sometimes, of the other continents, the water that reaches them. The grid of roads, the hairpin bends – the size of a city, a state, a country. The way home. The first train ride into Rome: what color were the buildings out my window? The lines of laundry: how many? The rattle of the train tracks, the boom of Italian on loudspeakers – operatic. A taxi ride, a short walk, a bed the shape of my hometown on a January night in your walled city. The words I learned: one at a time — scribbled index cards. The first time I spoke and how my voice shook. That night we met down Via Crescimbeni. Buona sera. A glass of something? Ice clinking. Your heart beating. A metronome.
Past Lives At The Nail Salon in Macerata, Italy
“In a past life, my father died of suffocation.” Angela is painting my nails crimson, taking her time at it, holding the plump of my fingers in her hand. She stops, looks straight at me. “Now he has throat cancer.” Angela is speaking Italian, and that word: suffocato, the double fs that she presses down on, the t that she spits out. “We carry the people we love,” she says it matter-of-factly, points to her neck as if something is tightening there, as if I can see it myself. I turn away, watch the polish on one hand dry, wait for the other hand, the soft brush of bright red on the naked nails. What I don’t ask is what I died of, in my past life. What I don’t ask is how many lives we get, when all is said and done.
Apparition
In the ghost of an afternoon, I feel my mother beside me. I put away towels and she is with me, a long wisp of her, sauntering by: she could curl up on the edge of the sofa, wait, whisper, linger unknowable in the lost things: nudge the remote control under the couch, the thousand earring backs that disappear, my missing glasses, a lonely sock; the way one day dithers, and then, with the sunset, it is lost too. I do not smell her, touch her, hear her but there are dreams again and she laughs: and I cannot forget.
Jacqueline Goyette is a writer from Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in both print and online journals, including trampset, JMWW, The Forge Literary Magazine, Heimat Review, The Citron Review, and Stanchion. She currently lives in Macerata, Italy with her husband Antonello and her cat Cardamom.
Image Credit Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash
