way one might turn away at a funeral from the corpse of a person he secretly despised. Benito grabbed his satchel and his jug of wine and shuffled away.

Mari listened to Benito’s footsteps fall off into oblivion as she worked her cloth over the neck of an oil jug about the size and shape of a wine bottle. Her eyes closed as she gripped the jug’s neck, hard, the way one might when a bottle suddenly becomes a weapon for bludgeoning. Her imagination erupted to life. An elixir of vengeance flushed through her veins. How good it would feel to chase down Benito and smash the jug across his head. But who was she kidding? Benito was merely an arm of the beast. And in an instant her mind’s eye set upon Giuseppe, until both the bottle and Giuseppe’s head were broke to bits, bizarrely shimmering with olive oil the very way her father had when he was killed.

Mari’s jaw clenched as she opened her eyes, rolled her neck and looked to the sky. Her hand was still gripped upon the jug’s neck, her mind ablaze in anger. Mari sighed. It was too much for her to process in silence and she found herself, as she often would, speaking her thoughts aloud. It was something her father had done and a behavioral trait common amongst the villagers. “’Tis good to speak the thoughts aloud in private,” her father said from time to time when she would catch him talking to himself, “for God can hear them more clearly.”

“Does not God in heaven,” Mari said in quiet fury, “see who’s blameless and who’s at fault as bloodless wounds of mine are rubbed with salt? Oh, father, if only fate had born me as a son, then by no man my inheritance undone. Must I stomach this womanly plight and lose what’s mine without a fight? As curs’d law condemns me in servitude to pigs, yet if born a man, I’d snap their legs like twigs, and run the blood of he who’d dare to spoil all in life for which father did toil. Woman, though, must suffer and concede whilst law and land condones greed. But not I! By heaven, I’ll have revenge upon the wretched knave who doth usurp with impunity and feast upon my father’s grave.”

Oh, how lewd! La Piccola Voce protested as Benito brought his hand to his mouth and wrung a thick globule of wine-scented saliva from his tongue. How wretched, the little voice continued, how absolutely wretched. The ranting, though, was of no use. Hiding there, in the shadow of a building’s doorway, just off the piazza, Benito felt the desire in his belly swell as the saliva in his hand commingled with the sweat and grime of his body to form a most unsavory lather. He focused his vision upon Mari, beautiful Mari, alone in the piazza. It was as if there was a demon inside him that begged for release each time he left her company—a demon that ravaged his body and scorched his mind with wanton thoughts, and blazed too hotly for the little voice to hold any effective council. “Oh, shut up,” Benito whispered sharply as he smacked his head against the wall beside him, knocking the little voice off its feet.

Across the piazza, Mari set an earthen jar of olives onto the wagon-bed, when something caught her eye. The lowering sun had moved directly into the alley space between buildings, and, in the periphery of her vision, she saw her shadow stretching across the piazza’s cobblestones. Her shadow was huge and the image brought with it an overwhelming sensation that as a little girl, perched upon her father’s shoulders, she had once before thrown a shadow across the piazza much like this one.

“Oh, my father,” Mari repeated sadly, “what trick of gloaming does this light and shadow play upon the eye that memory serves so clearly all that’s by and by? Is this the manner departed spirit takes sight, here to comfort me in time of plight? Does earthly desire once in heaven grow so mild that your spirit would not venture back to comfort child? Tell me, father, art there eyes in heaven? Does death not bring some reprieve, or do you look down on all that’s lost and grieve? And what rest, what salvation could soothe the soul, when all thou built in life in death is stole? The land, the fruit, the daughter, the woman once your wife,