baby out, the long black threads from which it hung like a puppet slowly lengthening…Adriana shuddered and shook off the image as she locked the back door and stomped heavily down the steps – she was fat. When had that happened?
Outside Villa Serra, the trees had started to tantrum, shaking their bushy heads – a storm was coming. Adriana cursed quietly, touching her fingers to her head and each of her breasts in turn. She never cursed out loud, only under her breath, and she always made the sign of the cross to nullify it. She’d been doing this since she was a girl but nobody had ever noticed it before Giacomo.
She had been working at Villa Serra for a few weeks when she first ran into him at the butcher’s. Giacomo had been leaning against the pole of the stall, smoking. Adriana greeted him with the deference due to the Signora’s brother, and though he greeted her back, she saw a vagueness in his eyes – there were many young maids at Villa Serra before the war. She began to haggle with the butcher over a rind of meat. When he refused to lower his price, Adriana cursed softly, her pursed fingers dabbing her forehead and chest. Giacomo noticed and laughed.
‘This is very charming,’ he slurred at her from his lazy lean. That was the beginning.
The end came months later and it was wretched. It was the usual story: Giacomo drifted away; Adriana tried to keep him. She even resorted to spells, each more desperate than the last. She wrote his name on a slip of paper and put it under a rock. She collected his semen, baked it in a cake and ate it. She stood between a candle and a wall and spoke an incantation to her shadow: all other women are like mud, I am as beautiful as the moon. She plucked out her hair and stole his and braided it together.
Adriana didn’t like to remember this last piece of sorcery: secretly culling the strands from his comb when he was in the other room, her hairline retreating to pale cul-de-sacs, the gentle braid of love turning to a ball of fur in her pocket. Worst of all was the horror in his eyes when he found it – which turned into a kind of peaceable regret when she confessed to him that she was pregnant.
‘You cannot leave me,’ she whispered, gripping his arm. ‘You cannot leave your child!’
His eyebrows rose, then lowered. ‘What child?’ He turned away and lit a cigarette.
* * *
Sibilla paused on the threshold of the cabin, looking at the sky. It was a piercing blue with a few lowhanging clouds, each edged with the blaze of the sun. She was mainly struck by how big the sky was. It didn’t seem that big from the inside. The wind stroked the hair on her face, then tickled her, then suddenly snuck around and blew at her from behind, raising the hairs on her body until they were streaming in front of her. She stood stock-still, arms locked at her sides, as her hairs flurried ahead, tugging at her, pulling her trotting along until she was outside the house.
She could see so far! To the right was Nonna’s tomato garden: knobs of red and yellow and green flesh dangling from vines. To the left was the valley: terraced villas and tangles of hazel trees in the distance. The sun spun its fingers through the clouds. As if beckoned, Sibilla stepped forward. And as if in reply, the door swung shut behind her. She spun around and pulled its handle but it stayed shut – it needed to be pushed from this side. But how was she to know that, having never been on the other side of the door – of any door – before?
Sibilla groaned and pulled to no avail. Above her, the sun curled its fingers back inside a cloud and darkness fell over the valley. She turned around with frustration and found herself in the midst of a cyclone. Spiralling gusts sent hair whipping back and forth, under and around her. She squatted down, gathering to her naked body what hairs she could.
* * *
As Adriana reached the switchbacks in the road to the forest, she pulled her collar high against the wind. The Signora had given her this coat. Adriana would probably pass it down to Sibilla someday and they would have to string the girl’s hair through