Free A Few Drops of Blood by Jan Merete Weiss

line, awaiting the brief daily intrusion of sunlight into the shadowed space. Nataliayawned. Queen Ann’s Lace and spindly weeds poked up through the cracks in the worn stone leading to the freshly painted, bright green outer door that she pulled shut with an ancient brass knocker shaped like the head of a lion.
    Her motor scooter was where she’d left it, hemmed in now by several other chained
motorinos
. Luckily it wasn’t too far. She could walk. Natalia pushed open the front gate. Via Giudice was nearly empty; Tribunali, quiet.
    Hair wild from sleep, Cecilia Bertolli, half owner of the Bertolli fruit stall, swept the walk in front of her shop. Her husband unpacked asparagus, the cigarette in his lips burned to ash.
    Natalia greeted them as she stepped into the street to avoid their boxes, then jumped back on the curb as a blue-and-white
latte
truck swayed toward her over the cobblestones, followed by a
motorino
driver with boxes of strawberries lashed to the back of his bike.
    On Via Duomo, the trees along the avenue were thick and green. Several homeless people slept in a huddle in front of the cathedral’s massive red doors. A white pug pulled its owner along, the leash taut. For a moment, its mistress lost her balance, her pink leggings and long, blousy top entangling with the lead until it threatened to topple her. Natalia just caught her and held her upright. The woman thanked her and picked up the dog, kissing it repeatedly.
    The boutiques hadn’t yet opened. Natalia ignored their window displays, instead looking at the reflected sky, hazy from the night’s rain. A day for witches, Natalia and Mariel would have said when they were children. They’d grown up with stories of witches who came from the mountains of Samio south of Naples and conspired there under the walnut trees. She and Mariel were convinced the hump-backed hag who lived in a ground floor
basso
two doors from herbuilding was a witch possessed of magical powers to communicate with the dead. Mean boys used her hump as a bull’s eye for spit balls and other missiles. When she screamed at them, Natalia’s mother would rush to the balcony and threaten to call the police on them.
    “Shut up,
garola
!” they’d yell and flash their tiny middle fingers.
    As could have been predicted, most graduated to petty crime and manual labor, except for Sandro Altra and Benni Torrone, best friends to this day, who had taken up intimidating and killing for the Forcella gang.
    Undeterred by the hooligans, the crone predicted the futures of hundreds of Neapolitans and kept herself in wine with their donations.
    Natalia’s
nonna
had twice dragged her to the woman for readings without her mother’s knowledge, then hid the prescribed amulets beneath her tiny undershirt. Her grandmother tried to keep it from her, but Natalia knew a violent end is what the old woman had foreseen.
    The stormy night had deposited a carpet of pink petals on the streets of the San Carlo all’Arena district outside the Santa Maria Donna Regina church. By its entrance slept young people sprawled every which way, guitar cases and a soggy drum set beside them—giant sleeping caterpillars that, when they played their music, morphed into butterflies. Afternoons and evenings these minstrels performed on the Via San Biagio dei Librai, their songs wafting over the crowds of strollers she and Pino used to join like ordinary citizens.
    Natalia couldn’t imagine the lack of privacy the street dwellers endured. Two nuns came out and stepped around them. Someone had deposited a bottle of water. A passerby dropped a pastry on the ratty cloth beside them.
    A girl with pink-tufted hair opened her eyes, stretched and curled back up for more sleep. Church bells tolled. A dog—part German shepherd—lay stretched out beside her. It looked clean and well fed, more than could be said for its owners. She counted five kids, two of them boys spooned together. None more than eighteen.
    The stone entryway to