Rounding the Mark

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Stinking, treacherous night. Thrashing and turning, twisting and drifting off one minute, jolting awake and then lying back down—and it wasn’t from having scarfed down too much octopus a strascinasali or sardines a beccafico the evening before. No, he didn’t even have that satisfaction. The evening before, his stomach had twisted up so tight that not even a blade of grass could have slipped through. It had all started when dark thoughts assailed him after he’d seen a story on the national evening news. When it rains it pours—all’annigatu, petri di ’ncoddru—or, “rocks on a drowned man’s back,” as Sicilians call an unrelenting string of bad breaks that drag a poor stiff down. And since he’d been desperately flailing in storm-tossed seas for a few months now, feeling at times like he’d already drowned, that news had been like a big rock thrown right at him, at his head, in fact, knocking him out and finishing off what feeble strength he had left.

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