by CD Reiss
The street. Damiano. The oranges. Mario blames me for the mess.
I open my best friend’s face. Blood everywhere. I’m in trouble, but my uncle stops yelling. He pats my head.
Emilio pats my shoulder. He says I have a certain something, then he steals it for his own purposes. I will marry his daughter to protect his interests. Then I am at his funeral, and I have to keep the promise he made for me. I’ve been sold for it, and I know I’m worthless because Emilio is a stingy man.
Violetta in the hallway. Part of me shifts. I never understand what it means, because Rosetta is crying. The boy cries when I kill him. Rosetta cries in relief when I give her the ring. I’ve made someone happy and soon—dead.
I can’t stop thinking about what I stole from the girl in the hallway, then I marry her, and I fuck her, and I love her. I protect her. Shield her. I make her life about me and what I can do for her. She won’t understand. She fights and resists. But she loves me anyway.
And now there’s light everywhere, and I know I am forgiven.
I am clean. My God, I am clean.
This is what they mean when they say your sins are wiped away.
I wish Violetta could know this. I’m not a devil. I’ll never be good enough for her, but I have a chance to not be bad for her.
And God says I will tell her one day, but the devil laughs from far away and says, “Enjoy sainthood while she’s getting raped, coglione.”
The shock of the devil’s truth turns me away from heaven and back to Earth. I see my body from above, flat on my back at the edge of the pool, one leg dangling in the water. A man in wet clothes crouches nearby, pulling Emilio’s ring off my finger.
“I told you there wasn’t no blood,” he says nervously, his voice close to me even though I’m a mile overhead. He pulled me out for that fucking ring.
“So shoot him,” says the man standing a few feet away.
I know the voice. He’s Lucio. From Lasertopia. Cosimo’s man. The one who acted as if he didn’t speak English. This man is a threat to everything I love. From the moment I saw him, I could tell he’d committed murder more times than he could count on his fingers.
Emilio’s ring comes off. It is meaningless. It’s not what draws me back. The increasing need to save Violetta pulls me through the thick space, against a tide, like a fish on a hook.
The man holds the ring up to the sun—to me—as I speed back to earth. He is Calimero Tabona. This is where Damiano is getting his strength—from the few Tabonas left after they tried to take Violetta. They are based on the other side of the mountains, in Green Springs, and now they’re here. Calimero starts to put the crown ring in his pocket.
“That’s Dami’s.” Gia’s words come from somewhere out of my vision, which has folded like an envelope.
Calimero shrugs and tosses it in the direction of her voice.
I spin through space with the ring. Vengeance unhooks me from Heaven, and when she catches it, I drop back to Earth like a stone, meeting my body on the pool’s edge. Breathing into motion, everything is everywhere. I’m facing every direction, seeing through closed eyes, and I know the backstabbing stronzetta leaves without another word.
She’s unfinished business. Her and others. Damiano. Marco. Maybe Loretta. Eventually Cosimo.
I can’t die until they pay for what they’ve done to Violetta, what they intend, and what they’re going to do. My soul takes back possession of my body as if blown into the fingertips and toes by the breath of vengeance—I’m going to kill all of them.
Animated by that sudden expansion, I take Calimero’s legs from under him, sweep up the gun he drops, and shoot in his direction. The pop of the gunshot is drowned out by the whooshing in my ears. I hit his thigh.
A shadow alerts me to Lucio’s movements. I point the gun at his chest, praying for a lucky bullet, and blow his face into a blackened hole of meat.
My vision is still swimming and my chest hurts. I expel two bullets in Gia’s direction before I bend and retch a lungful of pool water. It washes away a streak of blood on the tiles. Like a drunk committed to the inevitable, I heave again, coughing up the contents of my chest.
With a slam from the front door, Gia walks out of my range. For now.
A man sobs. It’s not me. Holding myself steady against the table, I look around. The green of the trees is shockingly vivid. The pool water is so transparent I can perceive the brushstrokes in the concrete’s turquoise paint. And the man dragging his bleeding leg as he crawls is cast in shadow as dark as the sun is bright.
I am here.
For whatever purpose God or the devil let me live, I have my own reasons for not letting death take me.
Wobbly for the first few steps, I intercept Calimero’s path to Lucio’s gun. He stops and looks up at me, his leg gushing on my patio. He won’t last long.
“Please,” he says.
“You need a tourniquet.” I crouch in front of him.
“I have a wife and a son.”
There was a time I wouldn’t have been moved by those words at all—except to extend his suffering for the insult of assuming I’d take on his personal problems. I’m surprised to find my understanding has expanded. I do care about wives and children.
“So do I.” I check his gun for bullets and snap it closed. “And you’re going to tell me where to find them.”
I press the gun to his forehead.
“I don’t know.”
This is a man who is either not getting the message or who’s been threatened with more than death.
“How old is your son?”
Calimero groans in pain, eyelids clamped shut. He’s losing consciousness. “Fourteen.”
“Ah, a nice age.” I drop into the nearest chair, where I can watch the path of blood behind the crawling man. I want a cigarette, but they’re soaked, and my lungs still feel half-filled with broken glass. “When I was fourteen, I swore an oath to the Cavallo family. My father was dead, and the man who took me in…wasn’t much of one. So. You get the family you get, no?”
“I can’t… I don’t…”
“Your wife though. Let’s make a deal.”
“Don’t.” Lucio’s gun is out of reach, but he grabs in that direction.
I lean my heel on his wrist. “If my wife is dead, I take yours.”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“You’d better tell me something, Cali. The hand of God pulled me out of death. What will you say when you meet Him? You didn’t tell me what I needed to know—what God Himself sent me back to Earth for—because you were loyal?”
In his weakened state, the superstitious logic gets through. He swallows hard. Blinks. Starts to answer, then stops.
“It’s Damiano,” Calimero says.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“And Cosimo. His father. Bankrolling. Paid us all.”
No surprise. Cosimo’s lusted after the crown since the day it was pulled from the devil’s warehouse.
“What’s in it for you besides a paycheck?”
“A place. Under the crown.” His energy flags. The river of blood from his leg flows into the pool.
“Where is she now? This is your last chance.”
“Don’t know. Tomorrow morning…church.” His eyes close, and his body goes limp.
I slap his face until he’s half-conscious. I’m trying to stay calm and failing. “Then what?”
“Marry her. Claim crown…”
Dami’s intentions with the crown may be to rule himself or give it to his father to expand his territory here. He may want to jerk off on it. None of it will matter. He’ll kill Violetta after God and the devil used up a miracle to save me from death.
“Where is she now?” I ask again.
But the light goes out from his eyes, and I drop him to stand. The blood stops flowing from his leg. He didn’t know. She could be anywhere, suffering in a thousand different ways.
“Fuck!” I shoot him in the head.
Bone
and blood and brain spray like paint. The bullet leaves a hole in the patio tile. No blood flows. He was already dead. Can’t turn back time and kill him. Can’t turn it forward.
Tomorrow morning.
I pace into my house, turn corners, sweep the pictures off the mantel, the garbage statues and clocks off the tables. There’s an entire house to waste time destroying because she’s out of my reach. I fall back onto the couch. My chest hurts.
How many hours to blow a hole through this town? Burn down every house she isn’t in until I find her? Leave them a place to run? To go deeper into hiding?
Out of habit, I reach for the pack of useless cigarettes, but they’re not there.
Not in one piece, at least. My pocket is full of soaked tobacco and paper sludge around a misshapen, dented Zippo, and I understand everything.
The bullet hit my chest hard enough to send me into the pool, but the lighter’s steel casing kept it from piercing me. When I laugh, my chest hurts, but I laugh anyway. Neither Heaven nor Hell saved me, but my purpose is both holy and damned.
Gia’s already telling them I’m dead.
Good. When I come for them, they won’t expect it.
Violetta and our child will live. Whether or not I die a second time is not up to any mortal.
God help them, and God help me.
I will kill them all.
5
VIOLETTA
Through my headache, I remember a thing.
Last night, or a few hours ago, or last week, Gia brought two guys into the room. One was the size of an old oak. He had no neck and a hairline behind his ears. The other was young—around my age—with full lips and big brown eyes as tender as undercooked meatballs. Behind them came a balding man with a round, clean-shaven face. I recognized him as Alina Farina’s father…a doctor from our little hospital.
He’d rooted around his bag and asked me how I was but didn’t listen to the response. He took out a needle, and I said, “No. No drugs. I’m pregnant,” but Gia sighed. Oak Tree and Meatball Eyes held me down so he could give me the shot. He either didn’t say what it was or I lost consciousness before I heard it.
“I respect the dead,” Damiano says again, but more softly.
Under my veil, I nod—not because I agree, but because I’m out of stall tactics, and nodding makes my head swim.
Clutching the plaster shard, I decide to die rather than be forced to marry again.
“You’re going to do fine,” Gia says.
Oak Tree and Meatball Eyes lead me down the marble hall, through the bronze door, and into the narthex of St. Paul’s.
From inside, an organ plays. It’s deep and melodic. Almost a little sad. It sounds like my soul’s song. A message, maybe, from beyond—from Santino—to tell me he’s with me.
A bolt of sickness crawls from my guts to my throat…another message from the embryo struggling to grow inside me. The man who planted it inside me may be gone, but it still needs me.
I commit to living for Santino’s child. The last thing we made together.
The suits part to let me inside the nave. Through the veil, I see the length of the long aisle lined with enough pews for an army of the devoted. Gia waits at the front, centered in the width of the aisle, all perspective pointing to her where she waits for the moment she doesn’t need Damiano and she can be fully free.
Behind her is the altar. No bridesmaids, no best man. Just an ancient priest and Damiano with a poorly-bandaged eye and an ill-fitting suit.
I don’t know who shoves me forward, but I go.
From the transept, the Virgin watches me for a second time. Neither she nor God are coming to my rescue.
The protruding edge between the fingers of my right hand grazes the palm of my left as I walk down the aisle of St. Paul’s for a second time, until I can see Father Alfonso’s cataracts.
No matter what happens, I have to live.
Heading up the carpeted path to the altar, I lose my footing up the steps. Meatball Eyes catches me and gets me on my feet, grabbing me by the wrist. Despite his soft gaze, he’s rough, treating me like a plaster statue that almost fell when he bumped into the table. I keep my fist around the shard, sneering at him from behind my veil. He holds up his palms as if no harm was meant, but he’s a liar—harm is definitely intended. He isn’t innocent. None of them are.
I get to the altar without help and face Damiano’s one unbandaged eye.
“Let’s get this over with,” he says.
Through the veil, I see his fear. His weaknesses. It’s as if I’ve known Damiano Orolio since I was a child, and I see that boy in front of me. He’s finally conquering Santino, the man who scarred his face, yet his one free eye darts from man to man, soldier to soldier, unsure of their loyalty.
Maybe it’s the diminishing opiates in my blood or the benevolence of the scapular, but I know that what I see as clear as day in Damiano is what Santino saw through his own eyes.
“Marriage brings us here today, to be witnessed by God,” Father Alfonso creaks, his voice old and warbling.
I close my eyes, breathe deeply, and focus on the priest’s voice.
I can get through this. Santino’s spirit is here with me. He gives me strength. Even in death, he is my courage. My vision.
Father Alfonso clears his throat before asking, “Do you, Violetta Antonia Moretti, take this man to be your husband?”
I open my eyes. Damiano stands over me expectantly, his one eye narrowed. He can’t see my face through the veil. I lean into him, and he takes me by the upper arms.
“Say it,” he says, jugular pulsing.
“I do—” My hand juts straight for his throat on his blind side, seeking the pumping vein with the Virgin’s shard. “Not.”
I’m grabbed, and there’s a shuffle I can’t keep track of, but I wave my fist with the sharp porcelain jutting from between my fingers, looking for a body to cut. When I find resistance in a dark suit, I slash left and right, up and down, screaming, “Non lo voglio!” Blood splashes on my veil, dotting it with black. I scream as he drops to one knee with one hand over his throat.
This is exactly as it should be. It is correct. His blood is payment for a debt, and every drop reweights the scales of justice.
I am righteousness and law. I am power and fire.
Slashing at the top of his head—at any bit of flesh I can find—I am no longer who I was.
The gunshots come from deep in my lungs as a primal death scream, and I fall on him, punching down with the plaster edge jutting from my fist as he bleeds and bleeds.
The cracks of gunfire are my soul shattering. They’re the blood jets opening under my thrusts. His wrists, his forehead, his choking mouth.
The pop-pop-pop is my rage clicking into my ecstasy with every cut, and the gunpowder is the smell of that union.
I am in a dream state when I’m pulled off him, screaming curses, flailing to cut him open again and again, until I wake enough to really see the man below me, and it’s not Damiano.
It’s the boy with the meatball eyes, widened to darkening headlights.
A voice I know and love reaches through the rush in my ears, and something I’ve lost and not had a moment to grieve for is found.
“Forzetta!”
6
VIOLETTA
St. Augustine said that to sing in worship is to pray twice, and Father Alfonso DeLuca takes that to heart, canting every singsong word of the ceremony as the boy twitches in an ever-growing pool of blood.
“Have you come freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?” The priest does not stop a sacrament. Not even matrimony, with the groom sputtering and bleeding at his feet, and my husband—who I swore was dead—in front of me.
“How?” I ask, though that’s just curiosity peeking out from behind tentative relief and joyful disbelief.
“Where did he go?”
He can only mean the man who kidnapped me and tried to force me to marry him. I point at the man
on the floor making the burbling sound. We both know that’s not him, but I point anyway.
Santino shouts to someone outside the tunnel of my attention. Find him. Someone shouts back. We don’t know. And Where? And they swear they checked everywhere from the front door to the sacristy to the basement. All the while, I watch the boy’s bleeding slow with the beating of his heart.
I should feel something about this body. I don’t. I only feel relief that my husband is here, but I’m too deep in shock to move toward him.
Santino takes a corner of the veil and pulls it off. Even with the lace grid gone, he’s still blurred when he gasps at the condition of my left eye.
“Damiano did this.” His words are flat and emotionless, as if he’s speaking through a cinder block wall he’s erected for my protection. “He’s going to have more than a bandage on his eye when I’m done with him.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say, pushing his hand off the bruise and pointing at the man I cut open.
But him? That’s what my pointing finger asks. He will not be fine, and he’s not who should be there.
“Will you honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?” Father Alfonso goes on, rocking back and forth, blind or indifferent to everything around him. The vows are a chanting backdrop to what I’ve done here.
Santino looks at the man clutching his throat, choking up blood that seeps and squirts through the fingers, and through the bright red mask painted on his face, are two matching eyes—unbandaged, unwounded by a cameo pin—both as big and soft as meatballs.
In the scuffle, I lost sight of who I was attacking. The shard drops from my fingers.
“Santino,” I say, still in shock. “That’s not Damiano.”
“This? No. This is Arturo Tabona.” He lays his hand over the one pressing the jugular.
I could do something. Stanch the wounds. Take him to the hospital to be sewn up. As long as there’s pressure on the arteries, he might even survive long enough to get to the ER, but not long enough to avoid starving his brain.
