Moving To Italy

Flash Fiction

There was a man who, working a dead-end job as an Assistant Professor, dreamed of moving to Italy. There, he would eat fig jam and salami on ciabatta, and watch the old men laze on the jutting shoreline, brown and fuzzy and round like kiwis.

Over the course of several years, he saved enough money to move by surviving on ramen and antidepressants. He flushed both away a few weeks before his flight, dreaming of the new leaf he was turning.

On the plane to Italy, he was reading Hemingway aimlessly when he came across a story called Out of Season. In it, an Italian drunkard wanted to fish with some well-to-do tourist. The tourist could have cared less about the drunkard, whereas for the drunkard, the tourist represented some idyllic state of being. The drunkard wanted them to drink marsala while fishing by the sea, but everything that could go wrong went wrong, and the tourist walked away, rejecting the offer to try again the next day. The story ended there, but the man knew that Hemingway meant for the Italian drunkard to commit suicide on the next page, the one left unwritten. The drunkard reaching out to the tourist to fish was a cry for help. The man thought it was quite a good story.

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In his sixth month in Italy, he was standing above the jutting shore, watching the old men laze. He was smoking an Italian brand which tasted terrible and probably had saltpeter in it. He hadn’t made any friends yet because his Italian was lacking and he was an awkward and shy man.

As he smoked alone, a drunkard approached him and motioned for a cigarette. The drunkard was so perfectly fitted in the dress of the tramp that the man almost laughed to himself, but instead, he held out the open pack. The drunkard grabbed the entire thing, lit one, and puckered his lips and closed his eyes in pleasure. He had two fishing rods sticking out of his ragged backpack.

“Nothing like the Italian ones, eh?” His English was great.

“Nothing like ‘em.” As the man spoke, the drunkard kept his eyes closed and pointed them towards the sun, apparently uninterested in conversation. Usually, the man would allow the silence, but today, he was lonelier than usual.

“You have great English.”

“The tourists teach me. I ask each one for a little lesson, and it adds up. But if they seem too retarded to give me a lesson, I just ask for a cigarette instead.”

The man tried to laugh in a confident and self-assured manner, but it came out closer to a loud cough. In order to save face, he decided to use some colloquial joviality picked up from sitting alone at bars and listening to people speak with their friends.

“Vaffanculo!”

The Italian drunkard copied the man’s laugh perfectly. He mimed, slapping his hands on his knees.

“Ah, Italiano, eh? Possiamo parlare Italiano se vuoi, piccolo Americano gay, tua mamma e una prostituta economica.”

He spoke quickly and fluidly, so the man assumed he had misheard the words he could actually pick out. The air was thick with sea minerals and cigarette smoke, and he felt little grey crystals forming in his throat.

“I’m, I’m not too good on my Italian, sorry. But you remind me of this one Hemingway story.”

“Infatti, tua mamma e una prostituta a cosi basso costo che mi strizzerebbe gli coglioni con felicita in cambio per questa sigaretta mezza fumata di merda che tengo qui nelle mia dita! La vagina di tua madre odora di pesce, ma io pescherei comunque nella sua vagina.”

“You... want to fish?” The man asked, as the drunkard walked away with his cigarettes.