read wolskin

He was there, eyes imploring me for death, and it would not be difficult for me to grant that wish. The Other awaited his fate with a look full of scorn and hate. Just one, tiny instant would be enough. I had to choose. I lifted my face to the sky, begging it to swallow me whole once that horrible mission was over. Whatever I decided, I would be a murderer. The icy wind whipped at my hair. I was ready. Ready to let the blow fall that would be fatal tone of the two bodies, and what I had thought of as invincible now suddenly seemed weak and helpless. For the first time, It was scared.

I had always preferred nighttime and darkness for a number of reasons that were all equally valid in my view. Paradoxically my fears were made less explicit and visible by darkness, populated as it was by my memories and my dreams. Yet, that winter, I learned to love the day more than any other thing. Even more than my own life.

    Our car had been heading north for innumerable miles, as if pulled on by some mysterious giant magnet hidden in the mountains. My father was an excited explorer looking for the Promised Land, and the map left no opportunity for wrong turns let alone changes of mind. Curled up in my seat in a childlike, almost fetal position, I tried, by fixing my hair at regular intervals and pinching my cheeks, to restore circulation to strategic points, to make myself presentable after those four interminable hours of traveling.
    I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, pale and sulky. I had officially entered into competition with the dull colors of the dark leaden threatening sky, and I was going to win.
    It wasn't always like this. Though I had not exactly inherited my mother's perfect harmonious proportions, I had inherited her eyes, eyes like two large golden shields, surprisingly vivacious in the pale angular oval of my face, as if a ray of sunlight had shot into my irises and shattered into a thousand shining wisps of straw. I was used to seeing them brighten on clear days, but when the sun only just managed to filter through the clouds withdifficulty, the colored circle would fade into an opaque and completely nondescript disk. There were so many details that made me look extraordinarily like my mother, yet at the same time, light years away from her by some mysterious distorted law of tit-for-tat.I had her hands, long and slender, her hair, a soft auburn wave easy to shape with caresses and brush strokes, her mouth. Absolutely totally all my own on the other hand, were an insupportable tendency to blush easily, as if my skin were so transparent it could not form a reassuring mask to hide my emotions, and a shyness often labeled as chronic, and as such, incurable. So, in all probability, that absurd decision to move us to the mountains in the middle of October, a traditionally wet and dreary month in our region, was a punishment. A punishment for the fact that every detail of my face, from the way I smiled to the way I arched my right eyebrow to show disapproval, shouted out my mother's name.
    I sat with my face against the car window. I had been like that more or less since the sea had disappeared from view. My quickly shattered hope had been that after the uninterrupted procession of forests and bends in the road that had been the main features of the last thirty miles, the road would have some surprise in store for us. The latest series of hairpin bends caught at my stomach, and the carsickness that had taken a brief timeout, came back like an old but unwelcome guest.
    “Here we are Emma, Petraselice, 2,913 feet above sealevel.” my father said, breathing in with an enthusiasm that was totally out of place, the thin rarified air, and above all, smiling.
    Neither of these things were reassuring.
    I immediately tried to picture clearly exactly 2,913 feet above sea level, and sadly came to the conclusion that it was an infinite amount. The valley that swallowed our car was like the dark belly of the mountain range. Surrounded in all directions byrocky peaks, we travelled along that umbilical chord smelling of burned or just cut wood, of greenness and ground sodden with the endless rain that, from then on in, would be the constant soundtrack of the long days to come. Petraselice, a bunch of gray houses climbing amongst the rocks as if put there by the talons of some prehistoric bird of prey, was just visible to us, rising alone on a chain of mountains of varying heights that prepared the road for the most imposing peak, making the surrounding land not only unknown, but inhospitable. It was as though it were completely unsuitable for life, and so seemed to suggest in an obscure and mysterious way that we should make a hasty retreat. That place made me uneasy right from the start, an unease that was followed by a strange sensation, as if within the total lack of connection between me and the surrounding area, its mountains, its darkimpenetrable forests and the squared off rocks, there was something, a detail, a smell, a color, a nuance, that suddenly and unexpectedly established a connection between us.
    Yet we continued to look at one another suspiciously, studying each other from a distance, like a hunter and his prey watching one another before attacking, escaping, or fighting back. Only it was not clear who was the hunter and who the hunted.

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