Fiction from Andrew Bertaina

Photo: Lucas George Wendt

In Amalfi

after Jack Gilbert

Mother used to tell us that if a bird fell from the nest, it was best to let it go. That the drama had already ended.

After we parted, everyone said we were always wrong for each other, that the affair was doomed from the beginning. But then relationships are their own soft mystery.

Before the love faded, I remember an evening in Salerno, eating figs wrapped in prosciutto and drinking bottle after bottle of wine with the Bay below us and the sky a river of orange.

I remember pressing my lips to your ridge of hip bone as the grey sunlight pressed at the window. And how we’d wandered through the streets of Amalfi and taken the snaking bus ride on narrow avenues back up the cliffs to our apartment and watched the sea light through a screen of roses and you’d crossed the room in that black dress, cinched perfectly at the waist, and we lay together in the darkness after making love.

And what I remember from childhood is nursing a small, speckled starling after it fell from the nest, its chest, a quivering metronome. I kept it hidden in my room, tucked in a small drawer where my mother couldn’t find it.

How even if in the end, the chick died, it briefly lived too, its hot mouth closing around my forefinger, desperate for touch as we were that last afternoon in Rome, when the cobbles shimmered in afternoon’s heat, and we ignored our sadness among the olive trees.

Everything that ends must be lived through first.

For a time, the bird sucked air, the orange light swam through the sky, and we were happy and drunk on the cliffs above the Tyrrhenian Sea.
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Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place, and the short-story collection, One Person Away From You. His work has appeared in The ThreePenny Review, Witness Magazine, Post Road, and elsewhere. His work has been athologized in The Best American Poetry, The Best Microfiction, and listed as notable in three editions of The Best American Essays. He has an MFA from American University.