Daniela Ronca writes Daniela Ronca popped up through the mists of Verona, but her blood contains the sturdiness inherited from her slavic ancestors. Her most cherished success was the short essay she wrote in third grade, which the teacher read aloud in class. She observes nature and social interactions, always looking for the lifeblood of trees and probably missing the forest altogether. She loves playing with irony and unexpected juxtapositions. She would probably write good poetry about birds and stuff, but she would first need a two week break from her side hustle as an entrepreneur.
A pairing for days of hell
There had been moons and suns drawing semicircles in the sky; there had been bunnies and wolf cubs running in the woods, free, scared, soft and on all fours. There had been a man, seated in the dim light, and there he was again. Many men he had once known should have walked on all fours too. The man uncorks the bottle of red wine, his fingers tracing snail roads in the dust. The glass is too short, like those his father used to taste from the barrel, his mouth precise like the snipers on the roofs of the city. The glass chipped, but a miracle that it had not exploded before he came. A sigh exhaled by the man, the chair creaking under his weight in a soft whine. A sniff at the cork, but does not flinch. After all, he knew already. He pours the wine, the gurgling not resembling a creek nor a spring. Only squashed rotten plums and violent density. The wine is spoiled. He takes a sip, tasting the sour varnish he used to brush on rifle butts. If only, if only. If only it were less thick, it could purify his insides, from the stomach out to the skin, like a sin corrosive balm. Instead, it lingers in his throat, repulsive as the smell of wounds he treated with what he had. A testimony of what was left. What was once cherry juice and pink blossoms, flowing between friends, laughter, red roses and sleepy cats, was now the grey grit of cemented agony, the non-existence of humanness beyond the advent of war. No sign of empathy, no literature to pair with a golden elixir. A perfect pairing, an epiphany quietly sneaking in his mind. This rotten juice, like the hearts that men crushed under concrete plates and a hail of bullets.
Photo caption: ‘We were only humans, this whole time’.
Published unedited and in accordance with the rules of the competition published here.
