A CHRISTMAS LETTER, Ploughshares, Spring 2014
I
was in Florence, Italy, when my father died. It was Easter Sunday and I was staying with
old friends, the Marchettis, in their apartment near Piazza delle Cure, a quiet
neighborhood on the north edge of town that you entered from via Faentina. We
hadn’t gone into the center for the big Easter celebration, but we’d watched
the dove and the exploding cart on the television.
We
were just sitting down to our first course–a rich broth thickened with egg
yolks–when I got a telephone call from my sister. My sister doesn’t speak
Italian, but she managed to make herself understood, and Signora Marchetti
waved me to the phone in the small entrance hallway.
“Are
you ready for this?” my sister said.
“I’m
ready.”
“Dad’s
dead,” she said. “Out at the club. He fell down in the locker room. Drunk. They
couldn’t rouse him. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital.”
“I
thought they kicked him out of the club?”
“He
got reinstated. He got a lawyer and threatened to sue them.” . . .
I think this is my best story. It will be published on line by Electric Literature on June 11 and will stay on line for one week. You can read it by Googling <Electric Literature's Recommended Reading> or by just clicking.