Ephemeroptera

Jennifer Francesca Sciuchetti

The following is excerpted from a short story that first appeared in The Aleph Review, Vol. 4 (2020).

Let’s say you had three wishes.

I never know what to wish for.

Okay,

I’d like to be a mayfly.

Sleeping

for three years in sand, then waking:

a few hours of gossamer life. Jewel-blue wings.

Maybe that.

Poesia di Anne Simpson

Mayfly, Jack Pine Press, Saskatoon, 2004

As soon as the sun collapsed on the horizon with the audacity of a demigod, Alice used to come out of the warm waters of the Tibisco. With its light no longer sprinkling the edge of the forest all round, Alice had a habit of abandoning its dark and muddy waters to plunge into the green of a lush and overgrown meadow.

She did it, Alice, rippling loudly the water with stereotypical gestures. Like an adult mayfly, aware of its flying at nightfall.

I always thought she wanted to get my attention. Getting closer, to slower and more measured steps, she would sit next to me. On the grass. Wet. Alice the indecipherable.

'Bathers' by Komail Aijazuddin (oil on gold leaf, 2019)

Managing not to look away from the waters she’d just seduced and abandoned.

The artificial proximity of our shoulders was enough for her, the edges overshadowed by the branches of trees that, behind us, were always growing in number and size.

We were pale. Pale and contiguous. Even if she, Alice, was more evident. Her skin, diaphanous and luminous at the same time, covered the thin surface of her adolescent body.

Trying as much as possible not to be seen, in the soft depth of those silences, I tried to furtively stretch my gaze in her direction.

We were always so close. Our shoulders, our acute angles. Because we could only be before and after the granted silence, actually. That’s what I believed. WhatI thought was real at that time and at times to come. Later in the years, after another thousand silences, I gained the chance to change my mind about that.

Everything always happened in the same way; according to the same order.

So it happened that my eyes rested, prying, on the curvature to which Alice subjected each of her slim vertebrae, drawing a semi-arc indistinguishable from the fading flicker of the ether at sunset. I could count them, those vertebrae. One by one, without committing the slightest mistake. Without any difficulty. That day and every day since.

I told you I never know what to wish for.

Two?

Why are you asking me all these questions?

Three?

I slipped, without delay, on the virtual embrace that her ribs, slim too, drew all around the chest, forcing it to tell itself that it was a cage.

I was stalling, looking up along the thin strands of wet hair that seemed to want to escape the exotic white crochet turban. They were still filled with water, those strands. Transparent tears would just be dripping off her neck down to the upper edge of the swimsuit. White too, with one exception. The

small embroidered powder pink peonies: the only childish quirk on a feminine background.

Her body was so thin that even the swimsuit couldn’t adhere to it. Too many edges, too many kinks made inaccessible to that smooth and elastic material silences and my stealthy looks were enough to wrap it up. To embrace her with tender and ingenuous momentum. They were the ones to tell our legitimate stories without having to resort to the cheating of words.

Our silences; they alone.

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Jennifer Francesca Sciuchetti is a poet, writer and physician currently based in Tuscany, Italy, with her partner and their son, Aleph Leonardo Ruggero Balthus. Her essays, stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including Ether, Viaggi di Versi, New River Press Poetry Anthology 2017-2018, New River Press Poetry Anthology 2018-2019, Poestate, Rough Night Press, Slanted House Zine and Rx Magazine. Jennifer is the author of Trattasi di Misera Carne, a poetry collection. She collaborates with Cadillac Magazine and has participated in poetry readings and festivals. She can be found on Instagram at @jennifer.e.francesca.

Komail Aijazuddin is a visual artist and writer with degrees from New York University and the Pratt Institute, who lives and works in New York City. You can see his work at komailaijazuddin.com

Author and artist bios for archive pieces are reprinted as they first appeared and may be outdated.