Мелисса П.. The Scent of Your Breath. Melissa P.. The Scent of Your Breath

Мелисса П.

The Scent of Your Breath

Melissa P.

The Scent of Your Breath

To Thomas, who knows how to sniff my skirt,

to my mother the forest,

to my sister the storm,

to my Nonna Madonna.

So go, take the train ’cause if you don’t go now, you surely will

– Virginiana Miller, “Elsewhere”

One

I threw myself into the streets of the world with a bee in my hair. A bee that buzzed among my tresses, beat its wings convulsively, and buzzed, buzzed, buzzed. I didn’t brush it away, I let it build its hive in my head, and everyone who met me said, “You’ve got hair like honey, ” and didn’t know that there was a bee in my head, rolling around playfully among my thoughts with its soft, bicolored body. And it kept me company, my bee did; it became an indispensable if not very trustworthy companion: sometimes it gave me little bites on the back of my neck that should have hurt. But my bee was too small to hurt me; it left honey in me but never poison.

One day the bee whispered something in my ear, but it was too faint a murmur for me to hear. I never asked what it had tried to say to me and now it’s too late. My bee flew away from my hair, all of a sudden, and a passerby killed it. It was squashed. On the white marble I can see a liquid gleaming, a substance: I pick it up with a little spatula and take it to an analytic laboratory.

“Poison, ” the biologist tells me.

“Poison…, ” I repeat.

My bee died of poisoning; it wasn’t squashed. A few hours before, it had bitten me.

Who’s going to keep my silences company? I miss the bee’s buzzing; I need its soft whisper. When the morning sun shines, I find my teeth clenched and a sound coming from my mouth: zzzzzzzzzzzzz…