Salvatore Scibona

At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy.

The woman’s blood is under his fingernails. Before he left, he washed his hands in her kitchen sink, then dried them, then washed them again. He washed the water glass he’d used. He left it to dry on the dish rack and went back into the parlor, where the woman lay on the floor. He introduced himself again, it was at least the third time, and asked again what her name was, but again she didn’t respond, or even stir, half-naked there under the coffee table. He couldn’t find a nailbrush, so there is still some blood under his fingernails. He tries not to look at the blood under his fingernails. He resists the temptation to smell them.

The cigarette machine came smashing face-first to the floor. The man stood cursing it. The problem seemed to be penetrating his mind that, even if he’d succeeded in breaking the glass of the face, the cigarettes were now safely entombed under the shell of the machine unless he could lift it back up again. He collapsed onto his knees and began scratching at the sheet metal. It was piteous and difficult both to watch and not to watch, Ciccio saw he was alone with this man, in the depot.