Livorno, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, 1573

Enzo burst into the shop and darted around the display table of mitre hats and brimless caps. He breezed past his father, ignoring his greeting. Not to be rude. Something was muddling the connection between his mind and his mouth. This had happened before, after he’d unwittingly felted wool from a sheep that had rollicked through a patch of deadly nightshade. The delirious Enzo proceeded to regale baffled customers with what, in his mind, was the lyric poetry of Sappho, but which emerged from his lips as incoherent bleats and baas. Present circumstances differed in one key respect: Enzo could not blame a hallucinogenic sheep.

He parted the heavy curtain and strode into the cutting room. The black velvet drape swung closed behind him. He gripped his chest to calm his palpitating heart, to no effect. He stretched the collar of his chemise to ease his constricted breathing, also to no effect. It was as though an invisible hand was pounding on his sternum and squeezing his windpipe – well, two invisible hands, he supposed.

Enzo paced the plank floor and pulled at his unkempt hair. Only one person could rescue him from the encroaching madness: the coachman. The coachman was the miniature doppelganger who lived inside his mind – the homunculus who, dressed in a driver’s livery, controlled his host’s every thought and action.

He rapped his knuckles on his forehead.

Where the hell are you, man?

He knocked on his pate again, harder. Knuckle-shaped contusions sprouted on his brow.

Why do you shirk your duties?

Had the coachman fallen asleep on his perch? Had he gone on a bender? Was he carousing with tiny coach-women? Was he frequenting a tiny tavern where groups of tiny coachmen groused about the people they animated?

Enzo’s rage turned to concern. Maybe his coachman was in distress. Maybe he’d encountered an unexpected bump in the road. Maybe he was languishing in a ditch, exposed to the elements, at the mercy of tiny highway robbers.

Enzo groaned. Knees weakening, he leaned against the cabinet of hat blocks for support.

Calm yourself, Enzo.

He closed his eyes, took a breath, and exhaled.

Get out of your head. The coachman can fend for himself. Think about your hands. Think about your work.

The tightness in Enzo’s throat and chest relented. His heartbeat settled into a steady rhythm. He was himself again.

There. That’s better.

Enzo opened his eyes and declared to absolutely no one, “Let’s get to work!”

Enzo spied a square of burgundy felt on the cutting table. It was badly wrinkled. He strode past Hermes’ portrait and entered the kitchen. He filled the flatiron with hot coals from the stove, then returned to the cutting room and pressed it into the fabric. An invisible cloud of heat buffeted his cheeks, carrying with it a gamy, animalistic odor that roiled his guts. He lifted the iron from the felt and instantly the odor vanished, and the nausea abated. When he reapplied the iron, the odor and nausea returned with a vengeance. He set the iron on end and dabbed his clammy brow with a sleeve.

He assumed the hot iron had liberated putrid particles trapped in the fabric. Occasionally, a drunken sailor vomited on the crates of rabbit pelts transiting from the Levant. But when Enzo sniffed the swatch, he detected nothing foul. He glanced toward the kitchen and recalled his mother had made candles that morning. Perhaps she’d dripped tallow on the coals. He opened the iron’s coal chamber and inhaled. He didn’t smell even a hint of rendered animal fat.

For Fate’s sake, I’m not imagining it . . . or am I?

Indeed, he was. He recalled the odor from a dream he’d had shortly before awakening. In it, Enzo was standing over the tiny coachman, who lay dead in a muddy ditch, his livery tattered, soiled, and sun-faded. He’d been dead for days and reeked of decomposition. His face, or what used to be a face, was raw and featureless – no nose, eye sockets teeming with fly larvae, mandible stretched into the semblance of a horrified scream. Enzo knelt and ran his fingers along a deep, narrow impression in the coachman’s thighs. He traced the impression to a line in the mud that ran to a hawthorn tree, where the carriage lay in shambles. The coachman, Enzo deduced, had been run over by his own carriage. What’s worse, this accident had happened before. It had happened to the tiny coachman’s father and grandfather, just as it would happen to his son and grandson. It was an unbreakable chain of accidents.

A primal rage surged inside Enzo. He pounded his fist on the cutting table and locked his flaming eyes on the ceiling.

“Listen well, Fate . . . or Moira . . . or whatever name you call yourself these days! I am leaving, and you cannot stop me. I shall cobble shoes or sow fields or lay bricks – anything but make hats. Mark my words. The only way I shall return to this hat shop is inside a coffin.”

If Fate or Moira or whatever-name had marked Enzo’s words, she might have annotated them with a word of her own: hollow.

* * *

Two years later, Enzo shambled back through the hat shop’s front door very much alive, though his ragged condition suggested he might have been cohabitating with the dead all that time. His aghast parents ushered him to a chair by the oven. His mother handed him a pewter cup of warm bone broth, while his father draped a wool blanket around his shoulders. After regaining some vigor, Enzo recounted his ordeal.

He’d gone to Florence and established himself as a cobbler. He spent his saved-up florins to buy hammers, awls, leather, a shoe stand, and to lease a hovel in the shadow of the Palazzo Pitti. In the first week, lightning struck the shop not once, not twice, but thrice. That final strike collapsed the roof. Still, Enzo counted himself lucky for having taken out insurance on his wares. Unfortunately, the policy offered no protection from a fourth bolt, which struck him directly and rendered him as hairless as the day he was born. Although the thick black ringlets covering his scalp grew back as before, the follicles on his pubis, under his arms, and over his eye sockets returned white and bristly. The jolt also damaged the nerves in his left foot, inducing partial lameness and an unsettling sensation that he likened to a fish in his shoe. A grouper, by his estimation.

From there, Enzo took a job with an industrial weaving operation. He didn’t last a day. Although his weaving technique was flawless, the warp threads snapped every time he threw the shuttle across the loom – indeed, across any of the ten looms he subsequently tried.

On a tip from a tavern-keeper, Enzo hopped a donkey cart to the Florentine countryside, where an elderly couple hired him to farm cabbage and eggplant for a share of the profits. Days were grueling under the hot sun, and nights were restless in the stifling lean-to in which he slept. Despite his diligent watering, weeding, and tending, the cabbage succumbed to locusts and the eggplant to a fungal parasite. Nevertheless, Enzo was heartened when the landlords accepted the bad news with grace. The woman waved off the apology, explaining that Enzo could not be responsible for what the Almighty God had willed. The man asked Enzo to pray with them. Five minutes of the old man’s monotonous reading from the Book of Job drifted into slurred mutterings and an interminable silent meditation. When Enzo began swaying involuntarily and feared his legs might give out, he opened his eyes only to discover the couple slumped over the dining table, hand in hand, their feeble hearts having gone the way of the ill-fated cabbage and eggplant.

After that, Enzo laid bricks for two churches, a water mill, and a warehouse along the Arno River. Well, he tried anyway. Violent winds, subsiding ground, and lightning strikes wrought havoc on every foundation and wall he’d had a hand in. His employers took notice, and the masonry guild eventually circulated a flier warning its members about the itinerant bricklayer with “the fat nose and pig-hair eyebrows.” A shame, yet Enzo found some solace in the sketch of his likeness, which accorded him the strong chin he’d secretly longed for.

Although Enzo had no employment prospects and nary a florin in his purse, he didn’t despair. To his astonishment, he seemed incapable of despair. Whenever he’d contemplate taking a blade to his jugular or slinging a noosed rope over a rafter, something joyful would pop into his head and muddle the morbid fantasy. It was usually a little thing, like eating figs with caciocavallo cheese, bathing in cold springs on hot days, singing bawdy villanelle in the taverns, and dancing – yes, dancing, notwithstanding his chronic case of “floppy fish foot.” He was especially adept at the Galliard, which involved quick, intricate steps and the ability to leap high in the air and execute one-foot landings.

And, of course, Enzo had to admit that millinery also brought him joy. His heart ached when he recalled trading Dante and Boccaccio quotes with his mother, while he and his father crafted linen coifs, velvet capotains, and conical hennin hats. He’d forsaken those sweet moments for a futile quest to liberate himself from Fate. But he’d deluded himself. That kind of freedom was a heartless abstraction. So what if he couldn’t choose his destiny? He liked making hats, and he loved his parents. Leaving the hat shop because Fate demanded he stay wasn’t an act of courage; it was petulance.

To be sure, Enzo couldn’t rule out the possibility that Fate had implanted a love for millinery and his parents in his mind. After all, these sentiments eventually led him back to the hat shop. But Enzo refused to believe that Nature was cynical enough to endow humanity with self-awareness only to deprive them of choice in all matters. There had to be one sentiment over which he, and he alone, had exclusive dominion, and he realized what it was. Although Fate might control his destiny and nearly every choice he made along the way, she had no say whatsoever about his attitude toward that destiny. He could freely choose to embrace his fate, to love that fate, to follow the creed of amor fati. This freedom was proprietary and inalienable.

Enzo’s epiphany triggered a fit of crazed, exhilarated laughter. As his guffaws died down, he swore he heard faint sounds in his mind. If he wasn’t mistaken, they were tiny footsteps. They were the sounds of a coachman climbing to his perch, taking the reins, and hollering, “Giddyap!”

* * *

Three decades later, Enzo sat in the chair by the tall cabinet of hat blocks, hunched over a blur of metal and fiber. While his fingers recognized the needle and thread, his aged eyes had to take it on faith because he was too cheap to invest in corrective lenses.

Stasi was standing at the cutting table, a mere five feet away. His eyes were young and clear. Stasi easily could’ve threaded the needle for his father, but Enzo was too proud to seek assistance, and Stasi knew not to offer it, for the gesture would only invite a reproachful scowl followed by a dubious aphorism like “Myopia is no match for a healthy dose of willpower” or “The man who cannot bend his eyeballs to his will is no man at all.” Not that Stasi was focused on his father right then. He couldn’t focus on anything. His mind was moving too fast. No, it wasn’t the speed of his thoughts. It was their direction. They were spiraling. They were a vortex, and he was trapped in the empty center. He grabbed the scissors.  

Enzo began to hum while rhythmically tensing and relaxing his brow. His fluffy white eyebrows merged and separated, over and over, like indecisive clouds. At length, he poked the thread toward the needle’s eye, or, from his perspective, toward the vague center of an amorphous, semi-reflective blob. He missed.

Stasi tightened his grip on the shears.

Enzo threw himself back in the chair, hard. “Damn my old man eyes!”

Stasi released an animalistic groan and threw the scissors on the cutting table. The clatter made Enzo flinch, interrupting his fit. He gaped at his son. What’s gotten into the boy? Stasi was quaking, building to another paroxysm.

Stasi raised a defiant fist and began shouting at the ceiling. “Mark my words. I am finished with hats!”

Enzo nodded with resignation.

Stasi kicked the cutting table. The table collided into the wall and jostled the portrait of Hermes. The portrait swiveled on its nail and knocked into the tall cabinet, where Bronte was perched. All at once, the cat’s one eye popped open, his tail shot upright, and he launched himself into the ether. Even by feline standards, Bronte’s landing was remarkably quiet. This wasn’t due to the cat’s innate grace but his pendulous gut, which had absorbed the impact. Bronte raced across the floor, belly swinging to and fro, tail fur flared like a bottle brush, and darted behind the drape separating the cutting room from the store front.

Poor boy, Enzo thought. He’s wasting his breath.

“Strike me down with a lightning bolt,” Stasi fumed. “Infect me with plague. Drown me in the Ligurian Sea.” His eyes were wild, his smile a mixture of lunacy and desperation. “I do not fear death. I welcome it, for when I finally cross the veil into Death’s domain, I shall carry your wretched curse with me. Ha ha!”

Enzo set the needle and thread on the cutting table. He stood and rested a hand on Stasi’s shoulder. His warm touch told Stasi in that visceral language spoken by fathers and sons, I know your anguish. Enzo did the only thing a cursed father can do for a cursed son. He embraced him.

Enzo broke off the hug, lest he dissolve into tears. Stasi nodded. Enzo went to the kitchen and returned with two cups of wine, handing one to Stasi.

Enzo raised his cup. “To you and your upcoming journey . . . and to him, of course.”

“Who’s ‘him’?” Stasi asked.

“How quickly you forget our traditions,” Enzo gently admonished. “It’s the fourth Friday of the month.”

“Right,” Stasi said dubiously. He shook his head. “Do you think there’s any chance he will show up in our lifetimes?”

“Only Fate can answer that question, my boy. Drink up.”

Enzo downed his wine, but Stasi brought the cup to his lips and hesitated.

“Something I’ve often wondered, Father – if it’s all up to Fate, why do we bother with the libation?”

“I don’t know if it’s all up to Fate. Maybe Fate has given him some say into the when and where of his appearances. Our ancestors clearly thought the ritual would get his attention.”

“It’s been twelve centuries. Clearly, they were wrong.”

“So far. Anyway, we do not drink just for him. We drink to celebrate our twelve centuries of perseverance. We drink to us.”

Stasi downed his wine, all the while maintaining a skeptical gaze on his father.

Enzo gestured with his head toward the stairway. “Pack your things, then we’ll have to tell Mother. She’s known this day might come, and yet . . .” His voice cracked with emotion.

“I’ll gather my things, Father.”

Quickly, Stasi set down the cup and headed to the stairs. Enzo cleared his throat and then straightened the portrait of Hermes. He scanned the room, bereft until he caught sight of the inchoate needlework on the cutting table. He picked up the needle and thread, squinted his eyes, and got back to the business of making hats.

* * *

Maria lay awake, drumming her fingers on the pillow in synchronicity with the raindrops pelting the ceramic roof tiles. She kicked off the blanket and rolled away from Enzo, both resentful and envious of her husband’s snoring. She slipped a gown over her camicia and went downstairs.

She prepared a bowl of Monticellan wheat dough and set it near the wood stove to rise. As she sat and waited, a cloying sensation crept into her chest. She had a name for this odd sensation, which felt like a vortex inside her heart – the “goodbye feeling.” She’d first experienced it on the sad day that Stasi no longer found her oven mitt puppet shows amusing. The second occurrence came after she’d returned home from a week in Pisa and saw a gawkish, teenaged Stasi in his same old doublet and jerkin, which, to her shock, he’d clearly outgrown. The third goodbye feeling had come upon her the morning Stasi stumbled home, reeking of a prostitute’s sickly lavender perfume. Enzo had prearranged the liaison, justifying the gift as a traditional rite of passage for Petasos men. Maria refused to speak to Enzo for a week. It took her a month to look him in the face without shaking her head reprovingly.

Those prior goodbye feelings had been triggered by Stasi’s metaphorical departures from one stage of maturity to another. This time, however, was different. Stasi was actually leaving home, and if things went as planned, he wouldn’t return. She’d been able to endure her boy’s steady ascendance toward manhood because he’d remained under her roof, albeit transformed. Come the next day, he would be gone. The prospect of having to endure that kind of goodbye – a real, enduring goodbye – terrified her.

Maria swallowed the lump in her throat and opened her copy of the Purgatorio. She flipped to the part when Dante entered Peter’s Gate. She read until Dante reached the sixth terrace. Retrieving the bowl of leavened dough, she molded it into three loaves.

She stared into the fire as the bread baked. When the loaves were done, she set them on the table. She pressed a finger into the dark brown crusts, liberating wisps of steam tinged with herbal notes. Satisfied with the crusts’ firmness, she wrapped a loaf in waxed cotton and slipped it into Stasi’s leather satchel by the front door.

“What are you doing?” Enzo asked from the steps.

Maria gave a start. She felt like a thief caught in the act, which she most definitely was not. She was the precise opposite. Thieves didn’t give things away. She was irked by Enzo’s purportedly innocuous question, which was really an accusation.

“Providing sustenance for my son,” she answered defiantly.

Enzo became agitated. “You know the rule, Maria. We cannot aid Stasi’s departure. Do you want to bring Fate’s wrath on our heads?”

“Don’t get your codpiece in a twist, Enzo. It’s a loaf of bread. Stasi has eaten hundreds of them under this roof.”

“Precisely. Under this roof. You’ve packed the loaf in his satchel. He will eat it on the road, under the open sky, after he has left the hat shop.”

Maria knew Enzo was right. “You and your inane family curse,” she said with exasperation. “Why did I ever marry you?”

Enzo wrapped his arms around her, pleased by his wife’s contrition. “Because of my Apollonian good looks.”

She playfully resisted. “Ha! You are short and squat. And that giant nose of yours? When you turn your head to the south, everyone in Pisa has to duck. And those eyebrows – oof! I could scour the skillets with them.”

Enzo smiled furtively. “The same hair grows on my nether regions. Come. Let us scour each other.”

He pulled her close. She swatted his chest.

“You’re a pig!”

Undeterred, he kissed her neck. “You’re just a font of compliments this morning.”

“Stop. You know how that tickles.”

He kissed her cheek, then her lips. He pressed her into the table and leaned his pudgy body into hers until she relented and kissed him back. With one hand, she swiped away a lock of fallen hair. With the other, she grabbed hold of Enzo’s right buttock.

“Well, I’m all packed up,” Stasi announced as he entered the kitchen. He stopped short. “God’s Blood! Can’t you two wait until I’ve left?”

Maria wriggled from the gap between Enzo and the table. She adjusted her chemise.

“Your father and I were sorting out a disagreement, and things, well, things got out of hand,” she said.

“Disagreement about what?” Stasi asked.

“Your mother’s bread,” Enzo said. “She snuck a loaf into your satchel.”

“I didn’t sneak anything,” Maria protested. “I placed it on top of your breeches.”

“Be that as it may,” Enzo said to Stasi, “had you not discovered the bread until later, Fate might have punished us for aiding your departure.” He opened the satchel, pulled out the wrapped bread, and offered it to his son. “Take a bite.”

Stasi’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “Right now?”

“Right now,” Enzo insisted. “You must start eating it here or else leave it behind.”

Stasi accepted the loaf. He peeled back the canvas and bit off the tip of the loaf, revealing a yellow interior. “Delicious, Mother,” he said with a full mouth. “Best you’ve ever made.”

Maria seized him in a tight hug. Caught by surprise, Stasi momentarily gagged on the half-chewed bolus.

“Careful, my love,” Enzo warned. “Don’t kill the boy before he gets started.”

She released her son, sniffling, and backed away.

Enzo patted Stasi’s shoulder and looked upward. “The roof leaked last night. Soaked my pillow. I must tend to the repair.”

“Father, let me take care of it,” Stasi said. “With your bad foot—”

Enzo waved him away. “Bah! I’ve made scores of repairs with this lame foot. I’m more concerned about my heart.”

“Your heart, Father?”

Enzo looked squarely at Stasi. “It will break in two if you do not leave us forthwith.”

Enzo moved to Maria and took her hand.

Maria wiped her tears. “Your father is right, Anastasi,” she said softly. “Let us not delay this awful business any longer.”

Maria had invoked Stasi’s full name. She hadn’t done that since boyhood. The name sounded formal and aloof coming from her lips.

Stasi nodded and headed toward the front door. He picked up the satchel and turned to say a final farewell, expecting to see his rheumy-eyed parents. But they’d moved on in that brief interlude. Enzo was fishing through the closet for a trowel. Maria was feeding logs into the oven. Stasi felt like a ghost at his own funeral. He’d been given last rites. It was time for the afterlife.

* * *

The cloudless morning sky glowed with oranges and pinks. The night rains had cleansed the accumulated donkey dung and human waste from the streets, and a generous breeze blowing inland from the Ligurian Sea was keeping the hinterland’s swamp gasses at bay. The breeze passed over the large shipment of ginger and cloves stored in the port’s warehouses, carrying piquant aromas into town. Stasi inhaled the sweet air, which infused him with optimism. Maybe, just maybe, Fate was smiling on him.

He contemplated which way to go. He could’ve turned right, toward Pisa and Florence, or left, toward the sea. His father had turned right and failed miserably. Left, it was. He sauntered past homes and shops adorned with frescoes of harvests, silk markets, corsair raids, and the celestial spheres. He negotiated the spades and shovels of Muslim slaves and Florentine prisoners who were digging a massive ditch into the old earthen road. Farther on, Christian peasants poured in rubble, compacted it, and covered it with a mixture of coarse aggregate and concrete. Soon, Livorno would have proper roads, just like a proper Tuscan city.

Only a year earlier, Livorno had been a swampy hamlet of a few hundred tradesmen, peasants, sailors, smiths, coopers, and Jewish coral merchants. To get there, inland travelers had to cross hectares of foul-smelling marshes, a breeding ground for the notorious “Livorno Fever.” And they wouldn’t have found much upon arrival: a modest fortress, warehouses, an arsenal for shipbuilding and repairs, and an underground grain silo. But then Grand Duke Francesco announced a bold plan to build canals and a grid of roads to suit a future population of ten thousand souls. Following an ostentatious ceremony with fireworks and a celestial-themed basse danse, Bishop Alessandro de’ Medici uttered a blessing, and the Grand Duke spoke what was to become Livorno’s new motto: “Diversis gentibus una” – out of many peoples, one.

The roads remained a work in progress. However, the Construction Office had completed several big projects, including a dike connecting the mainland with the lighthouse and another pier connecting the lighthouse to the Old Fortress. The Navicelli Channel had been widened for boats to reach the Arno River at Pisa. Livorno was slowly becoming the main transit point for commerce between Tuscany, Iberia, and the Levant. Its population was poised to explode, which meant the demand for hats was set to explode as well. Stasi hoped Enzo would be able to handle the extra work. Perhaps he’d finally invest in a monocle or a pince-nez.

Stasi tore off an enormous hunk of bread and stuffed it in his mouth. He ruminated over the ships he might board. The one bound for England? For Holland? For the Levant? He was leery of settling in a land where he didn’t speak the language, where his inability to communicate except through hand gestures and grunts would relegate him to brute, manual labor. Better to remain on the Italian peninsula, he decided. He would take a ship to Naples or Messina, where he could finagle an apprenticeship with a trading house. He figured an office job better fit his family’s social station, which hovered between tradesmen and merchant cl—

Stasi couldn’t breathe. He felt as though a stone had lodged against his uvula and was blocking his airway. He brought his hands to his throat. A gaggle of laborers on a water break gaped at the staggering, red-faced young man. A burly Moor dropped the dipper in the tureen and rushed over to the floundering Stasi. He got behind him, hugged his belly with interlocked hands, and gave a mighty squeeze. Stasi heaved, ejecting a round bolus from his throat that struck the wall of a nearby wine shop with an incongruous pinging sound. As Stasi bent over, hands on knees, to catch his breath, the curious Moor picked the wad from the dirt, shook off the bread residue, and wiped what remained against his stocking. It was a ring.

The Moor laughed heartily. He asked if Stasi was a djinn, for only djinns produced gold from their bellies. Stasi shot him a perplexed glance. What was the man talking about? Unsteadily, he stood and came over to investigate what appeared to be a woman’s golden posy ring in the Moor’s palm. Stasi picked up the ring and held it to the sky. Letters were engraved on the inside: “A-M-O-R F---.” A bready paste obscured the letters following the F. He cleaned the ring’s inside with his finger, revealing the letters “A-T-I.”

AMOR FATI. God’s Blood!

His parents’ wedding bands bore that very inscription. Could this ring be his mother’s? Might the ring have slipped from her finger when she was kneading the dough? It had happened before, but she’d always found it before baking. The ring in the bread must have been accidental. His mother knew well the consequences of providing anything of value that he might sell or exchange for shelter or transportation. Fate, however, wouldn’t see it that way.

Stasi sprinted home with the ring squeezed tightly in his fist. It wasn’t far, and when he got there, he spotted Enzo limping across the low-grade rooftop. He shouted to his father, warning him to stop moving in a panicked voice. The startled Enzo wheeled around, catching his lame foot on the edge of a roof tile. He lost his balance and stumbled into the two buckets of patching mortar. He reflexively spread his arms for stability, which helped his balance but did nothing to halt his forward progress. Momentum carried him over the roof’s edge. With his arms extended, it appeared he’d taken a running leap in a foolish attempt to fly. He crashed onto the muddy street with a grotesque cracking sound.

Maria rushed out the front door, asking no one in particular what the commotion was all about. She stopped cold at Enzo’s twisted corpse. She looked up and saw Stasi. She was flummoxed. Enzo was supposed to be on the roof, and Stasi had left home. They were not in their proper places. She had to be dreaming, she told herself. But she saw the wedding band in Stasi’s open palm. She felt her own naked finger and understood she wasn’t dreaming. She was living a nightmare. Everyone was where they were fated to be.

“What have I done?” she moaned.

Those would be Maria’s final words. For five days and nights, she sat in the kitchen in a cocoon of despondence. She didn’t speak. She didn’t cry. She refused all food and drink. She didn’t budge from the chair, not even to attend her husband’s funeral. All she did was stare fixedly at the mouth of the cold oven. Stasi read her the Decameron and short stories by Franco Sacchetti, and performed oven mitt puppet shows, but nothing could alter her stone-faced demeanor or pry her hollow gaze from the oven. He poured broth in her mouth. She didn’t swallow, and the brown liquid cascaded down her chin and saturated her chemise. Stasi bathed her and changed her until the fourth day, when he could no longer articulate her stiffened limbs or open her locked jaw. When a fog descended behind her eyes, he pressed his ear to her chest. He could no longer discern distinct heartbeats, just a meek whooshing sound. At dawn of the fifth day, he set off for the hill overlooking the sea and dug his second grave of the week.