Gentileschi, Artemisia. Allegory of Inclination.
THREE STORIES by JoAnna Novak
Burial Goods
She was running down the plankway, away from the latrine and the food silo, the sarcophagi, the urns, the fibulae, the coins, the kylix and the alabastron and the skyphos and the olla and the oinochoe and the stamnoi and the bucchero, the guard and the gorgoneion masks, the canopic heads. All afternoon, she repeated falsification, as if the wall text hadn’t referred to a nineteenth-century stab at Attic black-figure vessels. Then Santa Maria della Scalla, with The Massacre of the Innocents throned outside the old isolation ward, was behind her. Too young for everything: graduation day for Sienese students; Rossini’s barbering; pigeons glaring off Fonte Gaia. She sprayed a perfume called Dirty Heaven on a red-lettered card and, from another continent, had to be reminded that cappuccino was not a food group.
Hourglass
She was a stern woman, even her hair. In this temperament, she met her lover in the pasture. Supine suggesting death, not repose. Only her lover was asleep, dreaming horrible things, like moles and cartouches and losing the digits of her address to the atrophy of her mind. And her lover’s horse was no comfort, only standing faceless, attracting flies. On this occasion, a woman’s sternness could be a treasure, divine as youth. And she had had the foresight to ride her own animal to the scene, an animal on whose neck she now rested a gray palm, feeling grateful for her sensible attire.
Compensation
It is an irremediable evening, and so she orders cantucci and vin santo. The proprietor’s young son brings the delicate, plume-shaped glass; his father comes with the wine. The boy and the man wear sneakers with red and blue stripes on the sides. They walk similarly, like people who have been raised in hospitality, so their hands stay graciously behind their backs when they enter and exit the dining room. The cookies fill an apothecary jar next to a tower of meringues. Where do the meringues go? They’re nowhere on the menu. She is not talking to her companion and she cannot bring herself to dunk cantucci in wine. She stares at her food. She curses the moon. Once again, she has forgotten the word for check.
(8/4/24)
JoAnna Novak is the author of memoir Contradiction Days: A Writer on the Verge of Motherhood. Her short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and three books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her fourth book of poetry, DOMESTIREXIA was released from Soft Skull Press in July 2024.