Excerpt from No More Brothers
Wednesday, February 13, 1867
“Have you ever seen an old woman sitting near the public gardens? She chants some gibberish.”
“The gypsy queen?”
“She’s a queen?”
He shrugged. “That’s what Falco calls her. He said she has marvels. Once he saw her gazing into magic crystals and once, when a man passed by her and Falco was watching and the man was old and snarly just then as he was passing right in front of the gypsy queen she hummed at him and his arm turned into a pillar of fire and flamed with thick smoke and broke off and fell and shattered BAH-BOOM! like that, onto the cobbles right in front of Falco’s eyes and melted into the ground so Falco, he ran away real fast, faster than the train to Bagheria, and ran down the Serpentina to the water and covered his arms with the sea. That’s what he told us to do and he said you need to hold your nose whenever you pass by her, just pinch it like this with two fingers and run away fast before she sees, you especially if your arms feel cold.”
She smiled. She didn’t know that Teo had so many words locked inside his mouth. “Can you describe her for me?”
“Wears an old black dress with patches on it and a witch’s veil over her head so’s you can hardly see her hair which Falco says is made from the skin of slimy snakes and she takes up almost the whole bench but who’d want to sit next to her not me not with those spidery eyes of hers. That’s the one?”
Serafina nodded. “Exactly.”
“Used to be spooked by her and run when I saw her like the other kids because when I got close to her one time my arms started to cool up one arm then down the other.”
“When was that?”
“Two, three years ago.”
“When you see her now, do you run away?”
“Not anymore. I need to be grown up now, that’s what Papa says.”
“And are you?”
He nodded. “Our family, we got secrets and I know them but I can’t tell them otherwise I’d be a child.”
“And are the secrets good?”
He licked his lips and put a hand on his stomach. “They’re all right, I guess.”
Photo: Wooden angel in Catania. Credit: giopuo (Flickr)
