Ghosts appear and fade away in yellow tinted rooms where dry winter sunlight filters through papery yellow curtains. Picture such a room, now, in a small home in southern Italy.
The walls are lined with cases of butterflies, printed flat with great effort and care. In the left side of the room there sits a red couch with rural, idiosyncratic patters in yellows and soft greens spotting the surface. Dust coats everything here, excepting a small writing desk, on which sat an inkwell and a lamp with a stained-glass shade and an ebony stand.
There is a man in the room, with half-closed eyes and skin of a dark tan, reminiscent of a native of southern Spain, or perhaps Morocco. In his left hand he holds a paper cup of coffee, probably from the small coffeehouse in the neighboring alleyway. In his right, he clutches a stack of letters just acquired from a post-officer whose relationship with the coffee-drinking man went back no less than sixteen years. The man sits in a small armchair immediately to the right of the door to the room, which looks out the window, to the left of which sits the desk.
As he sifts through the mail, he looks down upon a name he did not expect (and yet fully expected) to see. Immediately, he stands up and walks to the desk, dropping the rest of the letters onto the armchair.
His gaze tightens into a grimace as he reads what she had written him; an inconclusive cry for help that had less substance than the quad con panna he sipped slowly, steam wafting up and around his nose. As the sun passes behind a cloud and the space is darkened, he picks up his pen and begins to respond.
He begins with:“dearest _____,”. And at that, as light again flutters into the room, in a silence so acute that the wings of hummingbirds would harmonize with the drop of a pin, he discovers, for the first time in a long time, that he is at a loss for words.
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