Free The Scent Of Rosa's Oil by Lina Simoni

out. “And go wash this smell of apples off you. It’s giving me a headache.”
    “I don’t want a party with all these guests,” Rosa moaned. “Why can’t we just have it with the girls?”
    “Nonsense. You are sixteen, and you need to meet new people. Those I invited are good friends of mine. Some of them saw you when you were born and occasionally when you were a baby, and are dying to see how grown up you are. Others never met you before, but heard of you many times. You’ll see. By the end of the night, you’ll have new friends.”
    “I already have a new friend,” said Rosa.
    “Who?”
    “Isabel.”
    “Who’s Isabel?” Madam C asked.
    Rosa looked Madam C straight in the eyes. “With this wind, there’ll be no fish tomorrow at the market.”
    Rosa had met Isabel two months earlier, during one of her morning walks. She had seen her shadow many times before, tucked in a dark, large booth at the corner of Vico Usodimare, blurred by a veil of vapor that often spilled out into the street. To Rosa, that shadow had always looked surreal. The booth was quite wide, half the width of the building it was in, and stuck out of the building wall about one meter, making the caruggio even narrower. It had a glass door with two windows on each side, like a store, so that some of its interior was visible from the street despite the darkness. On the rare occasions Rosa had glanced at the booth as she passed by, she had caught a faint sight of a mass of white, fleecy hair, dark skin, and a long black vest that made the shadow look as if she stood on a pedestal rather than on feet. Overall, Rosa was scared. There were rumors about the woman at the corner of Vico Usodimare, which Rosa had heard from the shopkeepers of Via San Luca and from Antonio Donegà, the chimney sweeper: that she sold spells to make a living, that she kidnapped little children and boiled them in big iron pots, that with one look she could turn a liter of milk into a sour mush. No one knew exactly who she was. The one thing everyone knew for sure was that she was a witch. “Stay away from her,” Rosa had heard one of the shopkeepers tell her children, “or you’ll grow pig’s feet.”
    One day, as she was heading back to the Luna from the port all caught up in one of her dreams about the ocean, Rosa unconsciously slowed down near Vico Usodimare, coming to a halt for a short moment. She was startled by a gentle voice that said unhurriedly in an accent Rosa had never heard before, “Your hair reminds me of the sunsets back home. If you were my child, I would name you Tramonto.”
    Rosa turned toward the voice, holding her breath as she realized it could have come only from the booth. She stood there quietly, as if hypnotized. In her black vest, the witch was on the booth’s threshold, smiling at Rosa through a thick vapor cloud. “I know what they say about me,” she said in her strange accent. “Would you like to know where this steam comes from?”
    Wide-eyed, Rosa turned around and ran as fast as she could to the end of the street. She arrived at the Luna panting and kneeled next to her bed with her head down. “Thank you, Angela,” she whispered, “for helping me escape a horrible death in an iron pot full of boiling water.” She took a breath. “I’m not a child anymore,” she said, “but I’m sure witches own pots of all sizes.”
    The echo of the witch’s voice lingered in Rosa’s head for many days. She often wondered if she had heard that voice for real or if it had been a dream. She talked about it with her friends one afternoon.
    “There are no such things as witches,” Margherita said.
    “That’s what you think,” Stella rebutted. “There are plenty of witches and wizards around us. People don’t know about them, that’s all.”
    “In any case,” Maddalena said, “I’m sure that there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for the steam. People say the meanest things, Rosa. You of all people should