Free Power to Burn by Anna Fienberg Page B

the bus and the cold bit into me, carving a red triangle out of my nose and mouth. By the time I had trudged up from the bus stop and put the key into my door, I could hardly move my lips for the cold.
    The stove in the kitchen was still glowing, and I shoved some more wood in there and drew a chair up to huddle beside it. The old lady I rented the room from wasn’t home,
grazie a Dio
, I couldn’t have stood her questions right now. Not that she cared particularly what happened to me. She only noticed I was alive if I dropped a saucepan on the tiled floor, or my rent was overdue.
    I should make up a fire in the living room too, I thought, but I couldn’t seem to move. Minna, the old lady’s ancient cat, twined around my legs, looking for milk. But I only wanted to sit there in the kitchen in my coat, with my eyes fixed on nothing like two switches left on in a vacant room.
    Pictures came and went and then I started thinking about the dead cat that Cornelia and I had seen one day when we were little. It was lying there in the gutter like a bit of old rubbish. Its front and back legs were stretched out as stiff as planks. I remembered that when we went close we saw that its lip was lifted and there were ants in the gums.
    We’d run all the way home and the next day it had gone. Now I know that the street sweeper would have come and put on his gloves and shoved it into his bag, along with the cigarette butts and the newspapers.
    My eyes prickled and I felt a wave of pity for the cat and myself, left lying alone in the gutter. Mamma often used to say, ‘Oh you’re just feeling sorry for yourself,’ in a disgusted tone, as if it’s some kind of sin. But I
do
feel sorry for myself now, every single day, and I’ve a right to. No one else will.
    That boss of mine, he won’t give me another thought. Those girls and boys giggling in the cafe, who do they care about but themselves? If anyone did care, why are there thousands of people lying in gutters or starving to death or killing each other? Nothing makes any sense.
    I often watch the tramps wandering about the town. When they go past you get a whiff of stale urine and caked dirt. They mumble to themselves and gesture, and people think they’re mad. It’s strange how it’s considered normal to mumble to yourself in church, and yet not in the street. You can sing at the top of your lungs in the shower, but not outside in the town. I don’t know, these kinds of distinctions seem to make less and less sense, and I see mad people gliding through them so easily, as if through air.
    Sometimes I think about the apartment I used to live in and the warm bed I slept in. It’s strange how I always believed I’d have a beautiful life, be famous perhaps, and loved by a man and a family. It seemed as natural as breathing.
    Fabio.
    His ashes are probably lying in some gutter, blowing particle by particle, across the world.
    I buried our ring near the chestnut tree outside this house. It’s a beautiful tree, bare as a skeleton in winter, but its branches reach out so far, bearing shiny brown fruit like a gift each year. I hope nothing ever happens to that tree. I think I’m going to have to live here forever to look after it.
    Mamma’s favourite tree was always the cypress. She loved how it grew so straight and tall. She said it had dignity. But I never liked cypresses. They give out nothing, their branches folding in on themselves as if they’re hiding something. They’re unloving, cypresses.
    Sometimes I think about Cornelia. How she’s growing up, if she’s won the battle with Mamma to cut her hair, if she ever thinks about me. I never thought we’d grow up separately, we were always branches shooting from the same tree.
    I don’t think about Mamma or Papà. For me they’re dead. As dead as Fabio.
    But I dream about them. I dream a lot these days and my dreams seem like the only real