{"id":1026,"date":"2023-07-17T11:53:32","date_gmt":"2023-07-17T18:53:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/?p=1026"},"modified":"2023-07-17T11:53:32","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T18:53:32","slug":"a-million-pieces-by-ryan-lillestrand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/a-million-pieces-by-ryan-lillestrand\/","title":{"rendered":"A Million Pieces by Ryan Lillestrand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Furniture was a quietly reassuring mainstay in a childhood of few constancies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Growing up, my concept of home was never anchored to a particular town or address \u2013\u2013 these changed every few years \u2013\u2013 but our small amount of furniture, with few exceptions, tended to move along with us; each new living room and bedroom presented my family with a new puzzle to be collectively solved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Which way to orient the dining room table? Where should we put the striped reading chair? Which of the rugs will fit on the living room floor, and which should be kept rolled up, stuffed precariously in the coat closet?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was generally an ongoing process; my father and mother adjusting things here and there as the early months in a new place went by. Often, I would come home from school to a house entirely different from the one I had left that morning. But over time the individual pieces gradually settled, like sand falling down to the ocean floor.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the furniture-puzzling process, not all pieces made it into the new configuration, leaving some to be sold or left to friends. One piece, however, remained a cornerstone of the furnishings of every home I lived in until thirteen: the red cloth sofa.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The sofa was older than I was, long enough to accommodate four people comfortably, more if everyone was close friends. It happily endured all the life that my family threw upon it for nearly two decades: the parties my parents hosted in their small apartment when they were first married, my brother\u2019s first steps using his small hand to steady himself on it, and my father scooping my sister up after work and tossing her gently into its soft embrace.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It sat by the back wall of our home in Impruneta, where a much younger me would race out of the bedroom door and topple over its back onto the cushions. It sat near the big window in our apartment in Salerno, where the scorching southern sun began eating away at its vibrant red color, leaving half of it a light blush where there was once a deep crimson. My mother sewed arm covers to hide the fading and the wear, clothing it against the assault of time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually, its frame began to lightly give way under the weight of the years, and its edges began to fray. With each successive move, my parents would make some comment about this apartment being its last, that it would not be making the next move. And then it always did. There it would sit, the centerpiece of another living room, just good enough not to be replaced. Or maybe that\u2019s one thing we all just didn\u2019t want to let go.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I have no sense of where that couch is now, but it has been so many years; it is surely gone \u2014 not just from our house, which I remember vividly, but from existence entirely. After so many years, to imagine it destroyed, expunged from the world of the living and the whole, is a startling kind of violence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, it was my father\u2019s choice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was in my first year of middle school when even the peripatetic life we had lived up until that point truly fell into tattered pieces on the floor, lost all discernible shape and stability. After school one day I raced home, excited to show my parents my good marks on the Latin exam I had been studying so hard for. Arriving outside our building, I loosened the top two buttons of my stiffly starched cotton shirt and ascended the stairs two at a time, the worn-out soles of my black leather shoes making almost no sound on the tile.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Our apartment door was open, the red couch was in the arms of two thick men, black hair curling off of forearms bared by rolled-up sleeves, gripping our couch. On that day, I cried and screamed. I leapt and grabbed onto its familiar cushions, cursing my father for letting these men take it away. My mother pulled me back, and I watched it turn the corner and down the stairs. I wrenched myself from her hands resting on my shoulders and ran to the window, watched the couch \u2014 the anchor of our home, the years of my childhood up until that point \u2014 slide into the bed of a truck and disappear down the street.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, he was not to blame.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

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Around the dinner table, most evenings, my father would dream. It was like this almost every night of my childhood. My younger brother and sister and I dipping into our soup or letting the pasta on our plates grow cold as we listened, spellbound to the imaginary worlds he spun in the air above the table. His voice rising, gesticulating more and more wildly, slipping into a fast, informal tone, he spun visions of train rides to clear blue lakes in Switzerland and summer vacations to the Amalfi coast. Things we would never be able to afford. But, on certain nights, we would go there. Leaping from the table, he would help us push the striped chair and red couch \u2014 the only furniture in the living room \u2014 closer together, draping blankets across the gap and filling the interior lavishly with pillows and blankets: our own private castle on the coast.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We would all pile in together, and my father would point out excitedly toward the dining room table, his eyes wide. \u201cLook! Do you see those dolphins jumping out of the water!\u201d He turned to look at us glowing, wrapping all three of our small bodies in his arms, \u201cDo you see it?\u201d And if you looked closely, you could.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe lives his whole life in his head.\u201d Our mother said, clearing the empty plates from the table. \u201cYour father is a crazy man, a crazy dreamer. I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019m going to do with him, he can\u2019t be helped.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My father looked at us again and chuckled. He teased her, calling out over the sound of the water running in the sink. He snuck into the kitchen, startling her. They both feigned frustration, but I heard them laughing, whispering so we couldn\u2019t hear.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While most of my father\u2019s fantasies never came true, I realized as I grew older that we were living in one; that the reason we had moved from Impruneta to Salerno, then Napoli, the reason my father designed and made shoes, was all because of his insuppressible ability to imagine another future \u2013\u2013 a multiplicity of possible lives beyond the one he was currently living.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over time, I learned he had renounced the family vineyard when his father had suddenly passed many years ago, severing himself from a world that had been his family\u2019s for generations. I came to understand that his younger brother had been forced to take it over, that he had had other plans too but a deeper sense of duty, as he called it, that he forever resented his older brother for that abandonment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We had moved south in the summer of 1967. First to Salerno, where my mother hated nearly everything \u2014 the stinking beaches, the open trash cans baking in the heat, the bustle of summer tourists \u2014 and put her foot down. Even as a young child, barely beginning elementary school, I remember listening to my mother and father through the door of their bedroom, her hissing in a sharp, commanding tone and him quietly acquiescing. The next day I came home from school to the small apartment in disarray. The next day we moved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Napoli is where we found home. My parents took what little money we had and wove a life out of it for the five of us. My father rented a small storefront on the corner, and my mother found a small two-bedroom apartment down the street. We filed in with our few belongings. My sister in the second bedroom, while my brother and I were on thin mattresses on the living room floor, which we packed carefully away each morning before dressing for school.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Chasing out of the school building in the afternoon, I often walked to my father\u2019s shop. Leaving behind the shabby, monotone building, I would break out onto the streets, alive with an energy that \u2014 at least up until that point in my life \u2014 I had never found in the classroom. I walked down the sidewalk counting the sheets hanging out of balcony windows, listening to the fruit vendor call out his wares, always stopping by the pastry shop to look in the window at the display case piled high with <\/span>sfogliatelle<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>struffoli<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>graffa napoletana<\/span><\/i>. I only finally stepped away when I could no longer bear it. Sometimes a friend would come with me on these tours through the neighborhood, but most of the time I went alone.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Pushing the shop door open was entering a portal to another world, far away from the bustle of the street. The room smelled richly of fresh-cut leather and the wood polish my father had used to make the counters and shelves shine. The small front room hummed with the low murmur of conversation, my father leaping from the back room at any question. I was always captivated seeing him like this.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At home, my father was always joking and dreaming, clearly tired from being at the shop all day but not enough to stop him from kissing my mother, scooping up my sister into his strong, polish-stained hands, sending sparks of life across the apartment when he walked in the door.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At work, he had the same light within him but a perceptively different hue. In the shop, he was organized and formal, greeting customers in his crisp, northern accent. His tools and supplies neatly laid out behind the counter. The shelves always clean, everything at right angles, the mirror sparkling.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Any customer through the door was an opportunity for his next performance: asking questions, checking the soles of shoes, looking for the patterns of wear that gave away the secrets of their gait. Sometimes when I came to sit by the counter he would teach me \u2014 how to spot pronation or supination, how to craft something that solved a problem for someone.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I never saw my father treat any two customers differently. He resoled the baker\u2019s cracked leather boots for the third time with the same care as when he knelt in front of wealthy customers to measure their stockinged feet for custom shoes or cut leather for a new women\u2019s traveling shoe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually, though, he would always shoo me out. He always did it kindly, but I could never understand why. He would make excuses: a message for my mother, doing my homework, helping my younger siblings with theirs. I now wonder if he had seen the early rumblings of what was to come or if he simply couldn\u2019t bear to have me there for too long, didn\u2019t want me to start seeing the \u2018shop him\u2019 as the primary mode of his character and personality; he had to somehow preserve that image, for me and for himself. At this point I will never know; I can only guess.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My father worked alone, both because I think he liked to be with himself for those hours and because there was never enough money to even hope of hiring anyone to help. But in all those years, he never seemed to mind. He loved being in the shop in the early morning, especially before the customers arrived. He said it was when he was free to experiment and dream, designing styles of his own before the more mundane routines of the day set in. Every morning he would rise before anyone, prepare a small, simple breakfast, and close the apartment door quietly behind him, careful not to wake my brother and me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of the time, however, I was already awake. On the days when I hadn\u2019t been up late doing homework, I would get up when I heard the shower running, the daily sign that my father was up. I would rise, clearing the blur of sleep from my eyes, and get a glass of water from the kitchen, listening to the faint murmur of his singing through the bathroom door. He would sometimes scold me for waking up too early, saying that I would be exhausted at school, but I knew he wasn\u2019t really serious, and I treasured that morning hour.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When he would dress and head out the door, I would lean out the window, watching him walk down the block. Occasionally, I would see Giovanni\u2019s father and Sofia\u2019s father \u2014 two of my classmates in middle school \u2014 who both worked at the factory at the edge of the neighborhood, walking with him in the early morning haze. Sometimes they would walk quietly, sharing in the silence of the street; other times my father would hurry up to them, speaking with them in impassioned tones and handing them pamphlets of paper with densely packed lines of text. Sometimes I would hear scraps of sentences from their conversations on the sidewalk two floors below: \u201cthe alienation of factory labor,\u201d \u201cthe inhumane working conditions of the industrial capitalist system,\u201d and \u201ctaking back the means of production.\u201d Phrases that meant nothing to me then, but I now understand them carrying a passionate and dangerous ideological weight. Phrases that I now know some people in the neighborhood did not want to hear, and more than that, wanted to thoroughly extinguish.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Donato Serrata was one of those men. He drove around the neighborhood in a car, a luxury none of our friends or neighbors could afford. He lived on the top floor of a newly renovated apartment several blocks from us. He was the stuff of mythology at school where my friends would tell tales of seeing him on their walk home, peering down from his balcony in large, tinted sunglasses and dark, finely crafted clothes, looking like an enormous spider.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even then, I had some sense that his ominous aura held more weight than the tall tales and ghost stories traded between classmates; that in the world of adults he was, in some sense, a figure to be avoided at all costs. My parents never explained then, but they always told us to avoid speaking with him, that he was dangerous, the worst kind of man. \u201cHe and his cronies terrorize the workers,\u201d Giovanni\u2019s father would say. \u201cHe\u2019s got half of the neighborhood under his thumb in an indecipherable web of debts and favors.\u201d Signore Giordana would remark, shaking his head. On certain mornings, listening to bits of conversation floating up from the street, I would hear my father and his friends speaking of Serrata in severe, hushed tones: \u201cloan shark,\u201d \u201cextortioner,\u201d \u201cfascist.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Leaving the shop one day, I passed him on the street, his lumbering form upon me before I realized he had even been approaching. He didn\u2019t even give me a moment\u2019s glance, but my eyes, driven by a potent blend of terror and curiosity, searched his face \u2014 the tinted sunglasses that obscured most of it, making its ruddy and wrinkled surface entirely unreadable, the heavy, deliberate gait. Right before I turned the corner into the courtyard of our apartment, I watched his hunched frame and the flapping corner of his long coat as he opened the door to my father\u2019s shop and stepped inside.<\/span><\/p>\n

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A few days later I walked home from school and found both Giovanni and Sofia\u2019s fathers sitting around the dining room table with my father. My mother\u2019s back was turned, carefully stirring something hot on the stove. She turned at the sound of the apartment door and smiled briefly before using her eyes to direct me into my sister\u2019s room where she and my brother were playing with a raggedy stuffed elephant.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCiao Matteo, ciao Isa.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCiao Emi, come join!\u201d My sister called.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t, sorry. I have homework.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Matteo grunted disapprovingly but I chose to ignore it, instead asking, \u201cDo you know why they\u2019re here?\u201d Nodding in the direction of the hushed voices coming from the dining room.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d Matteo shrugged, \u201cthey\u2019re <\/span>your <\/span><\/i>friends\u2019 fathers.\u201d By now he had bored with the elephant and left it to Isabella, instead staring half-heartedly at the crumpled sheet of math homework lying next to him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ignoring his mood, I plopped down on the floor, laid out my books and papers on the pale green comforter of my sister\u2019s bed, and started to study. A few minutes later, my mother came in, wiping her hands on the front of her apron.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGiovanni and Sofia\u2019s fathers are staying for dinner tonight. They have some important things to discuss with your father. I\u2019ll call you all when the food is ready, but for now stay here and let them focus.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We all nodded in assent \u2013\u2013 Matteo and Isabella without even lifting their eyes from what they were doing \u2013\u2013 but I stared hard at my mother. Her hair was tied up in a slightly messy bun, and the soft wrinkles of her smile were as they always were, but there seemed to be something strained behind it, a vague distress that had been palpable in the room the minute she entered. I thought of asking, but I didn\u2019t know what to say, and she had returned to the kitchen before I had the chance to collect the feelings and turn them into words. I went back to my books.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

About half an hour later, deep into my Latin homework, the faint murmur of conversation was broken by the sound of Sofia\u2019s father\u2019s deep baritone voice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAlessandro Fiorucci, you are a damn fool, a <\/span>damn<\/span><\/i> fool,\u201d he paused, \u201cDon\u2019t let your principles ruin your life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I heard my mother shush him reprovingly and a mumbled apology in return. Shortly after, the three of us were called to help set the table. Dinner was small talk and silence, an invisible weight where my father\u2019s jokes and dreams usually danced.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The day I finished elementary school our building had a celebration. Pasquale from the apartment below, Marina from across the hall, and Edoardo who lived on the top floor had all passed the graduation exam. The floors burst into life that day, apartment doors open, people talking and laughing in living rooms and the stairwell. It was perhaps an extravagant event for such an early milestone, but reflecting on it now, everyone was looking for an excuse for such a gathering. It was a perfect Saturday in early summer \u2014 time to set aside the occasionally grim realities of life, the businesses, and past squabbles and be together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dining room tables filled with food and dishes passed from one house to the next. The Baranellos brought loaves of freshly baked bread; the Rivellis came with a slab of prosciutto and cheeses. The food changed hands and the wine flowed as the soft, warm afternoon sun filtered through the curtains and scattered across the full room. The Giordanos came in, their father with his deep, resonant laugh, his wife in front of him with their two young daughters in her arms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAlessandro, Francesca, congratulations!\u201d Signore Giordano boomed, giving my father a firm handshake, enveloping my father\u2019s graceful craftsmen’s hand in his enormous, darkly tanned clasp.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Signora Giordano walked up to my mother and gave her a kiss on both cheeks. \u201cAh, you too must be so proud.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYes, yes.\u201d My father started, sliding his hands contentedly in his pockets, \u201cwe\u2019ve got a little professor on our hands, he\u2019s got all A\u2019s on the graduation exam, even Latin and mathematics!\u201d I stood a few steps away in the kitchen, glowing, a fizzing pride and excitement shooting throughout my entire body.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The old widow, Signora Cellini, even came down for a little while, leaning heavily on her smooth, dark wood cane. She gave the room a kind, knowing smile, finding my mother and handing her a small plate spilling with her <\/span>sfogliatelle<\/span><\/i>, a celebrated delicacy with a reputation throughout the building. I ran over and greeted her before grabbing two off the plate. Signora Cellini laughed. My mother slapped my hand but let me keep them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finding less interest in the conversation of parents and neighbors, I slipped out to the small courtyard. Running down the stairs to the door was a moment of true bliss, like everything in the world, normally spinning and crashing and revolving wildly, had suddenly aligned itself into perfect order \u2013\u2013 the praise of my mother and father, the pride of having graduated, the excitement of starting middle school next fall.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Outside I found my friends already in a heated game of soccer, running back and forth, the tattered ball periodically soaring into the air, a cloud of dust creating a hazy atmosphere in the entire courtyard. I jumped in. We ran and ran until a mixture of sweat and dirt stuck to our legs and our shirts hung loosely and heavily on our thin frames.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At a break in the game I called, \u201cI\u2019m going in for water!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAww giving up already, I see?\u201d My friend Stefano joked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry, don\u2019t worry, I\u2019ll be back in a minute!\u201d I yelled, already chasing up the stairs two and three at a time. I wove through a sea of adults, darting through our apartment, completely unrecognizable with all these people in it, and to the sink in the kitchen. I dipped my whole head into it, soaking for a few seconds under the cold tap before taking a series of greedy gulps.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cUh, what, have you become a camel now?\u201d I heard my mother tease from behind me. \u201cYou certainly look and smell like one.\u201d She chortled, looking me up and down, touching the sweat-soaked sleeve of my shirt. \u201cWell, at least they aren\u2019t your school clothes.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry Mama, I can help clean them if you want!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAh, don\u2019t fret about it, it\u2019s already done.\u201d She urged me towards the living room. \u201cNow move, I need to start the pasta.\u201d I smiled, kissed her on the cheek, which I\u2019d only been able to do in the last few months due to an unexpected growth spurt, and made for the door.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Something unusual, however, caught my attention, arresting my movement in an instant mixture of curiosity and concern. I saw Sofia\u2019s father and Stefano\u2019s father, the neighborhood carpenter, talking with my father in the dim corner of the living room. My father\u2019s laughter and jovial manner from earlier were gone. Stefano\u2019s father was waving his hands in sharp, cutting motions, staring directly into my father\u2019s face which was impassive, contemplative, and far away. His eyes seemed to have found some split in the wood floor of the living room; his stare was intent and unblinking.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My father murmured something inaudible, and Stefano\u2019s father put his arm on my father\u2019s shoulder, snapping him out of his other world. He gave him a squinting look of reproof before directing his gaze sharply at me as if he had somehow sensed my eyes on him for some time. His gaze crushed me for reasons I could not express, driving straight through my eyes and echoing throughout my entire being. I ran.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I had never seen that look from him: defiance, anger, fear. The fear, the hollow look it gave his face, pierced me. I fled down the stairs, my heart pounding in my chest and my ears. When I broke out of the dark stairwell and into the sunlight, I found my friends still kicking the tattered ball around the courtyard. I rejoined the game, but only half-heartedly \u2014 for me, the celebration was over.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Some said it was a still-hot cigarette in a nearby trash can, a tragic accident or the work of divine provenance, but I see it now as it was: a matter of time and opportunity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My father, his northern accent, his politics, the way he had entered rootless into a neighborhood already a world all its own, the way he had rejected the way things were, the way he constantly talked about how they ought to be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A couple of weeks after the party, I heard my father wake with a start. He rushed, partially dressed, through the living room and out the door which shut with a bang that shocked me awake. My mother ran out of the bedroom shortly after, dressed in her nightgown and slippers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStay here Emi!\u201d She commanded in a shrill tone I did not recognize. \u201cDon\u2019t leave the house, and look after your brother and sister!\u201d She shouted the last as she also slammed the front door. It was still inky black outside; an unsettling silence fell back over the apartment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Matteo and Isabella had also been awoken by the commotion, rubbing the bleary sleep from their eyes and squinting around the room. I rushed to the window. I leaned out as far as I dared, watching the silhouetted figures of my parents at the end of the street. The shop was on fire. Flames burst from it, a raging orange-red glow casting long, menacing shadows.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My father lunged towards the already blazing door, but my mother held him back desperately, clawing at his chest and screaming. Hearing their distant cries, Matteo and Isabella squeezed on either side of me to look out. I braced their small bodies with my arms, making sure they wouldn\u2019t fall. There, with our three heads peeking out the window, we watched our father shatter into a million unrecognizable pieces.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The fire roared and cracked now, flashing from the broken windows. My father stood there, my mother still wrapped around his back, screaming into the fire. He cursed it wildly in a way I\u2019d never heard him speak \u2013\u2013 he spit at it; he cried desperate pleas that it would stop, begging it to save some charred piece of his life\u2019s work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even from down the block, I could see his body begin to convulse with violent sobs. He turned towards his wife, buried his hot face in her neck, he slid to his knees, and then twisted gently and fell to the ground. My mother followed him, holding his crumpled body, both of them lying in their pajamas on the soot-stained street.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In time, neighbors and people from nearby buildings poured out. In the sudden bustle, I lost sight of my parent\u2019s bodies. Soon after, the neighborhood firemen came. They set furiously to work getting the blaze under control, trying to ensure that it did not spread. But at that point there was nothing to be done for the shop \u2014 it was gone, a hollowed, blackened shell.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The flames that had devoured the store also licked at the margins of our life and then ravenously devoured its center.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After the shop burned, the little joys and rhythms of my days began to give way. When I left for school now, my father was still at home in his pajamas, sitting quietly at the table sipping a cup of coffee. The next week I heard that Matteo had gotten in a fight at school after some kids had insulted Isabella at lunch, calling her the daughter of a dirty communist. At the grocery store with my mother, friends from the neighborhood would now greet us briefly, nodding their heads and hurrying onto the next aisle \u2014 terrified, perhaps, of the possibility that such a fate could befall them \u2014 that compassion and friendship were complicity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Through all of it, however, the idea of moving did not seriously cross my mind. In my naivet\u00e9, I could not comprehend the gravity of all that had happened in the last several days: how my father, and by relation us as well, had been thoroughly shut out of the neighborhood by forces beyond his control. It was not his fault that we left. And yet, when I ascended the stairs to find our home in disarray and our red sofa in the arms of strangers, I could think of no one else to blame but him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The next morning, we all rose early, packed our last remaining belongings into suitcases, and walked to the corner, catching the bus for Napoli Centrale. In the soft, blue morning light the neighborhood, despite everything, still looked achingly like home. As the bus shuddered to a start, I watched people pass on the sidewalk, many of whom I knew; shortly after, we passed the pastry shop I had always walked by on my way to my father\u2019s shop, spilling with a wonderfully warm glow. As we left the neighborhood behind, I closed my eyes and listened to the people speaking around me, soaking up the Neapolitan accent that had become so familiar, that had become mine. For the first time in the shock and disorientation of those days, I cried.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When we arrived at the train station, real life snapped violently back into focus. We stepped off the bus and waded into the swirling ocean of the main terminal. We were all holding hands so as not to get lost in the crowd: my father holding my mothers and mine, her holding Matteo\u2019s, Isabella\u2019s holding mine. My father pulled us towards the big board on the wall, scanning for our train \u2014 platform 24, to Firenze. We were headed home, a place which no longer felt like home, but which represented a return, my thirteen years of life coming full circle.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When the train lurched to a start, it brought with it a sense of irrevocable finality. It was over. We had left. Home was no longer home, but a naked and echoing apartment in a neighborhood we were no longer welcome. As the train picked up speed I watched as Napoli slowly receded, the buildings growing shorter and farther apart, the densely packed city giving way to the openness of the countryside.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My perception of my father changed fundamentally that day; he was suddenly deeply and terrifyingly human, vulnerable to everything I was. I was only thirteen the day we left but surrounded by all our belongings in the compartment, watching my world slip away and splinter into a million pieces, my childhood abruptly ended before my eyes. I turned to look at my father, desperately searching for solace, for hope. I watched as he stared out the window, broken and lost, crying softly. I realized his world, his dream, was falling into a million pieces too.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Furniture was a quietly reassuring mainstay in a childhood of few constancies.\u00a0 Growing up, my concept of home was never anchored to a particular town …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,51,54],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-1026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","category-online","category-spring-2023","tag-ryan-lillestrand"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/scrippsjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}