Galluzzo
In the field she hangs whites while her little boy talks to the chickens. She is sure he is on the cobblestone patio where they park the rental car. One edge of the patio stops at a stone wall that hedges in the steep trail through the olive grove down to a rusted-shut green gate; the other ends at the marigold house where the woman and her son and her husband are staying; the third abuts a wire coop and a decrepit barn housing dusty farm equipment and four chickens, which the boy and his nana named on video calls: Red, Daisy—and two more.
The woman hears and forgets these names immediately.
In the field, she dismisses pathology. She admires the sun illuminating her wet white clothes. They are hers, and now it seems she acquired them for the purpose of displaying them, sodden, on the bowed length of rope strung between two slender trees. Ruff-necked Swiss dot dress, butterfly-sleeved dress edged in black, strappy dress thrice tiered where the hem skims the grass. The grass in the field is tall, blade-tipped, the sallow chartreuse of courgette flesh—and its sharpness, the gnats and mosquitos, means she is ankletted in pricks and bites.
This pain, she appreciates.
Down the field she tromps, pressing into her heels as she goes, because the clothesline stands on a gently sloping hill. She has already tripped. Vaguely, she worries about her husband, who is out running in the height of the day’s heat, mounting vertiginous inclines, not proper paths or shoulders but roads that seem nothing but blind turns, taken by cars and motorbikes at speeds that trigger the woman’s headaches.
What will she do if he is struck by a car? If it’s her and Leo in Galluzzo, alone?
“Baby,” she sings, jogging onto the cobblestones. “Leo, baby.”
She scans the patio. The table, where they eat panzanella and salami, cookies from Buonamici. Chickens, gone. The wind is still. She smells sun baking wood, something dankly vegetal.
“Leo?” she calls, louder.
Not by the wire coop. Not in the house’s shadowy entryway, where wine barrels draped in tattered velvet stand before old armoires. In the rafter, doves churr. Shat spatters the stones, blats of white and black, where her son keeps his red plastic bucket. Inside, a happy-faced car with hillocks for fenders.
She checks the two wooden doors leading into the house proper: unlatched. She rushes in, stops on the tiled square between the staircase and the curtained opening to the kitchen. The refrigerator is closed; beneath the basin sink, the washing machine door is open, as she left it, metal drum filled with her family’s wet clothes.
No basket, no hamper. She must carry as much laundry as she can, ignoring how the load dampens her shirt against her chest—this was an annoyance, moments ago.
She tears upstairs into the slip-covered living room. Bookcases to the ceiling, her son’s markers and Uno cards on the stone floor. The three bedrooms upstairs are all dark, shutters blocking the sun, and Leo is nowhere. In the bathroom, with its undraining shower and her scale from home, a tiny green Speedo hangs on the rack.
“Leo!” she screams.
Now she remembers the gate at the bottom of the hill. The green gate the house owner swore didn’t open.
Back outside, she runs down the muddy path. She has not moved this fast since the accident that brought on the headaches and she might as well bash her head all over again if she doesn’t find Leo. The ground is root-choked and dotted with the shells of small cream-and-brown snails her son loves.
“Leo!” she shouts into the hot tangle of branches. The ground crunches beneath her.
To her right, there is a wall taller than any adult, impossible to scale. To her left, the olive grove, which leads down to the driveway and out to the road. How would she find anything in the overgrowth? When the flashes of sunlight set off her headaches, when she is not sure how long her family has been on holiday, when she dreams of empty white dresses and her address plate back home, the numbers smudged away like powdered sugar?
“Mama,” she hears. “Come find me!”
“Leo? Where are you?”
At the bottom of the hill, her son: curled into ball, hugging a chicken. It is the black one, a shock of red feathers on its head. The bird is eerily calm, purring like a housecat in the boy’s arms.
“What were you doing?” Her voice shakes. Tears sting her eyes.
“Me and Mohawk were playing hide and seek. You found us!”
Yes, she thinks. Mohawk, Cohawk, Daisy, and Red. Now she remembers their names.
JoAnna Novak is the author of seven books, most recently, Domestirexia: Poems and the memoir Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood. Her short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and three additional books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, and other publications. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Southern California, as well as an MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MFA in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis.