"If we let you sleep in a bed like a normal boy you will dream of it for all eternity while you lay there cramped in a little coffin! Do you want such longings? No child. You will die soon as the Doctor told us and It is much better to have never known what it is to be alive than to die young and dream of what you could have been.”

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Thanks for reading! This is a series novel. If you like odd dramas about odd things, stay tuned. I'll be writing a chapter in the series at least each week here on Steemit. If my schedule allows, maybe more. Follow @ezravan

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Chapter 1 - Part 1: The Quiet Ways Of Zola

No one knew that Zola Piccolo had died that misty morning. There were no reports in the Bergamo Village paper or mourners to carry her body back to the place she was born because there was no body to lay in the grave. Two weeks after she had returned from Spain, she began to doubt her own existence; becoming more transparent and quiet with each day until she was no more. For years after her disappearance, ghost-like figures of her son Piero, and husband, Elmo who was a very quiet man, wandered the narrow halls with silent feet over the scarred wood floors, searching for the once iconic woman, who's bold bitterness once filled every dusty room with hostel silence and regret. But they found no remaining substance, no flesh, nothing that eyes could see, for all that was left of her in that small two bedroom apartment on ViaGambito was the quietness of her ways.

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Zola did not believe in God because of sex. She was especially troubled by the thought of a God with a penis, like the God-Man Christ. The closest she ever came to worship was bowing to count the money in her red velvet purse after a profitable weekend in the market selling her pig fat soaps.

It was a well-known fact in various prayer groups around Bergamo that Zola would go to hell. Father Mallard, from Sacred Heart Cathedral, had on several occasions proved beyond question her damnation straight from scripture. Mallard’s three part sermon titled ‘the damnation of Zola,’ was a masterful diatribe, with such complex textual arguments woven together from the prophets to the apostolic letters, no laymen would dare question it’s hermeneutical soundness. Though she had been baptized into the Church and taken of the the Holy Sacrament, and done all things required of the believer, his sermon proved without a doubt that she had in fact been cut from the vine and the holy tribe of Israel and would spend eternity in a special white fire blazing for the Pharisees, the lawyers, the bankers and the bastard children of God who waddled their tongues in public. For those that had done business with Zola, that 'white Fire' could not come quickly enough.

Zola had two children but she had never consummated her marriage with her husband, Elmo, who was a very quiet man. Her first son, Piero Piccolo, was mysteriously conceived in a bathtub after she bathed in Elmo's leftover warm bathwater which was the reason Piero was so slight and frail.

On a summer morning nine months later Piero was born. The doctor told Elmo that their boy, being so slight and frail, would die very soon. He said he couldn’t say exactly when but would be surprised if the child even lived through the year.

Hearing this news, Zola instructed her husband to build a small coffin from the wood of a cypress tree. Elmo had a way with wood. Though words seldom escaped his lips in the main apartment, alone in the woods, the conversation never slowed. He spoke to the trees. They told him many things.

He cut down a twisted cypress that hung precariously over the cliffs, looking down on the ocean. Its roots were finally giving way and it had not spoken to him for many years. The old cypress was not dead but it had long given up on living. It’s large gnarled roots looked like the stressed biceps of a man under the skin. Elmo said his fair wells and brought it down in a day. He carted it home to his wood shop and worked on Piero’s small coffin for seven days without rest. The small coffin was expertly crafted, heavily varnished, with an intricate carving of children at play around a father as he harvested grapes in a plentiful vineyard. He lined it with a fine purple linen that Zola had brought on one of her regular trips to Spain.

Piero slept in the coffin until his feet hung over the edge at the age of three. Zola then had Elmo build another, larger coffin, this time from a mulberry tree that had split in a lightning storm and lay waiting behind their building. Elmo spent three weeks building the new larger coffin with an attention to detail like nothing he’d carved before. A scene of a bullfight in an ornate frame of red stained roses and swords ran the circumference of the outer walls.

Believing that Piero would die soon, as the doctor had said, Zola paid little attention to him. From birth, she had made Elmo feed him goats milk from a pigs bladder so that he would not know the warmth of a woman's breast or the scent of her hands. Nor did she enroll him in school or allow him to play with the other children in the neighborhood, not for cruelty’s sake, but rather that he might be saved from one of the many longings of the dead: a memory of their childhood in life.

Piero quit speaking at the age of twelve after asking Zola for a bed like she and Elmo had. He wanted it made from olive branches, like a birds nest, with a headboard of oak engraved with a brigade of soldiers unified in one collective step; like the men he had seen on holidays marching outside his window. She told him that he was to die very soon, as the doctor had said, so he should learn to be satisfied with a coffin where the dead sleep forever.
"If we let you sleep in a bed like a normal boy you will dream of it for all eternity while you lay there cramped in a little coffin! Do you want such longings? No child. You will die soon as the Doctor told us and It is much better to have never known what it is to be alive than to die young and dream of what you could have been.”

On a cold November night as Elmo tucked Piero into bed. Piero uttered his last words: ‘Tell me about America Papa.’ Elmo hunched down on one knee and whispered to Piero. “America, she is like any other land except she is a child, like you. Children believe things that us old men can’t believe in more. That’s why she is beautiful. I hope you see her before she grows old.” Soon after that night Piero became invisible and was never seen in the little two bedroom apartment on ViaGambito again.

Piero’s not being visible in the flesh went unnoticed by Zola. She set his place at the table as she always had done and at the end of the meal she could see his plate was cleaned as it always had been. After Dinner, as was the routine, she continued to draw a bath for him each night and instructed the transparent boy to wash his pene, as if it were his ano. When the bath time was over, the water was cloudy as it always was after Piero’s washing. With the results of the daily routines appearing the same; she never noticed that he had slipped away into his quiet state of invisibility.
...to be continued

Read _Chapter 1, Part 2 >>>> _

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Thanks for reading! Follow me @ezravan and leave me a comment. Suggestions, grammar and such are much appreciated. I write because I enjoy it. Always looking to make it better.

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