The Sun and Other Stars Read Online Free

and embedded by the spring torrents. I can feel my breath squeezing in and out, my heart flopping against my rib cage like a dying moth, and I imagine flipping a switch and opening a panel of gills all the way up my side. The mule track closes in on me, and I scrape my hands along the rough walls, combing the weeds that grow out of the cracks between the stones.
    Midway upon the journey of our life
    I found myself in a dark wilderness,
    for I had wandered from the straight and true.
    How hard a thing it is to tell about,
    that wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh,
    even to think of it renews my fear!
    It comes into my head, light and bubbly like a nursery rhyme. The first week of liceo, Charon tried to scare us by making us memorize the entire first canto. Casella and I stayed up all night, high on espresso, singing it to different songs to make ourselves remember. First the national anthem, then a stupid Lùnapop song that I won’t even try to remember the title of because I don’t want to get it stuck in my fottuto head. Then that bella-ciao-bella-ciao-bella-ciao-ciao-ciao song.
    Shit. Now that’s in my head.
    I keep walking. I catch a whiff of an unearthly stink, and I know I’m close to Mino’s house. The last thing I need right now is to wake up his stupid attack dog di merda. I try to creep by slowly and quietly, but a set of small yellow eyes appears in the path ahead. I freeze, and so do they.
    “Go away!” I whisper.
    It’s a cat, and through the darkness, I can hear it digging in, hissing and spitting at me.
    “Go on. Shoo! Go!”
    She gives a rolling yowl, filled with all the desperation of the world, a heat that will never be relieved. You will not get through here, she hisses at me, not if I have anything to say about it. No chance. Turn around and go back. And she punctuates it with another yowl.
    “Come on, you fottuto cat. Move! Go! Via! Shoo!” I whisper.
    I pull a weed from the wall and throw it at the eyes of the cat. The dirt explodes off the roots, and the cat screams, its lean body leaping away into the ether. Mino’s stupid attack dog di merda wakes instantly and starts barking its head off. I throw a clod of dirt at him, too, and I can hear him smacking his lips as he eats it. I throw another one in the same direction, and he’s finally quiet. I hurry up the last stretch of the mule track, feel for a gap in the wall of cypresses, and push my way onto the field. It’s dark now, and the faint outline of the vegetation takes shape around me.
    I take another drink and wait a minute for my eyes to adjust. This is the only flat spot above town large enough for even a three-quarter-sized calcio field, but nobody but me really comes up here anymore. The grass is so long, it could wrap itself around my ankles, and I stumble and high-knee my way toward the goal, the shadow of the old liceo looming behind a second row of cypresses. I haven’t been inside in three years, but that’s a story for another time, and after I tell you about the Hand of God and the Great Woman Famine, I will tell you that one, too. I reach into my pocket for my phone and shine the light on the ground, cutting a narrow swath through the grass until it finds the headstone. Luca’s photo smirks back at me from the laminated frame, his face scrubbed, his uniform ironed, his cleats immaculate.
    “Ciao, stronzo. Happy anniversary. Tomorrow, eh?”
    I’m not sure exactly how Papà convinced Mamma to bury Luca in the goal. Convinced is probably not the right word. After Luca died, Mamma was just a husk, and maybe all he did was plow her under. All I remember was that there was a lot of crying (Mamma) and yelling (Papà).
    “I coached him in chickadees on that field! He scored his first goal on that field! He will be buried on that field!” And he had Silvio make a strong recommendation to Gubbio, the mayor, who signed a piece of paper that said Papà could be leased the field for one euro per annum plus responsibility for