laughed as they drank and as they toasted. They laughed as they ate and danced. They laughed as the stars grew bright and they laughed as the sky went blue with dawn’s first light. They laughed as they grew more and more drunk until their bellies could hold not another drop of wine or laughter. Some laughed as they stumbled home and fell into bed; others laughed as they crumpled to the piazza floor and passed out. They laughed as they fell asleep and then went right on laughing in their dreams.

Mari laughed because she did not fall asleep and Davido laughed because Nonno and every Ebreo from Pitigliano had. Together, Mari and Davido laughed, because as the entire village fell with sleep and intoxication, they remained standing. And they went right on laughing as they snuck off down an alley. Laughing that a plan unspoken could come so perfectly together. Laughing as their arms and hands and lips and tongues slithered and constricted around one another, proving that love too is a thing worth laughing over.

In which We Ponder

Four Types of Death

Nonno was in the lead. He was too old to sleep in a wagon-bed with a group of drunken men half his age and younger. Illuminated by the dawn light, he was conducting a pair of donkeys along the road that led from the village to his farm. Behind him, in the wagon-bed, lay his beloved donkey. Behind him farther still, two other wagons, each pulled by donkeys and conducted by half-asleep men from Pitigliano. It was a good thing that the Ebrei from Pitigliano had been there at the feast. Had they not, Nonno and Davido would never have been able to transport all the crates of wine and oil back to the farm, let alone deal with the task of moving Signore Meducci so he could be buried in the very ground he considered his rightful property.

Davido had been given much: eleven cases of the finest wine, eleven cases of the best olive oil, with nine bottles per case. The wine wasn’t kosher, but to Nonno, that fact made it all the sweeter. True, he had reservations about Davido being declared the victor, but he was, nonetheless, the proudest he had ever been of his grandson. The boy had some fight in him, a touch of madness too! He had bested a village full of gentiles and a miracle such as that was more than enough to make kosher any Cristiano wine.

Nonno peered over his shoulder and noticed that the rigor mortis that had set in within hours of Signore Meducci’s death had yet to relent. Like a comically macabre statue, the poor dead beast was frozen in the position of his last moment of life, including his enormous cazzone, petrified in its final semi-erect state. Yes, it wrenched his heart, but Nonno nearly chuckled at the look of annoyance calcified upon the donkey’s face; that death should visit him at such a public and inopportune moment.

Of all the beings that Nonno had loved and who had died, this was the best death. He had seen many deaths, some honorable, some pathetic and some horrible. He once saw a starved and syphilis-mad sailor aboard Colombo’s ship chase a rat right off the stern, plunge into the ocean and be consumed by sharks—a pathetic death. In Il Nuovo Mundo, he watched, bound and helpless, as the Indiana woman he loved sacrificed herself so he might live—an honorable death. And then, many years later, he witnessed his second wife, son and daughter-in-law die slowly and miserably of plague in the ghetto of Florence—a horrible death.

Yet with all the death Nonno had witnessed, he’d never before been privy to such a good and perfect death, a death in which a being takes leave of this world in a manner both glorious and entirely consistent with how it lived. Such was Signore Meducci’s: a perfect donkey death—proud, defiant and ridiculous in a way that only an old donkey or old man can be. Nonno only hoped that one day he would have such a death. Perhaps, thought Nonno, I too should have died at the Festa along with my favorite donkey. I could have died laughing.

SAUCE

In which We Learn

of Tossing Crumbs

& Furthering Plans

Only Benito never laughed. He could not stop sobbing. He’d been dragged off into the dark of an alley, where he lay unconscious, his body blanketed in vomit, his dreams wracked by a demented orgy of demons. And