STILL LIFE (or The Beauty of Mutual Feelings) by Sarah Cipullo

Dan Havel and Dean Ruck - Tunnel house black hole

Time dilated slowly and she could fragment it precisely in femtoseconds, attoseconds, zeptoseconds, yoctoseconds… How much life can I live in a yoctosecond? She wondered.

«I don’t love you anymore,» Anna repeated to her.

The words slid nervously along the walls. They dropped from the wooden voids of the attic rafters and made their way across the floor, into the dust. Her metatarsals snapped as she felt them violent under her feet. Hard they knotted painfully in the legs, crawled among the vertebrae. She bent under their weight and they branched into her lungs like poison. She could see them, she thought she could touch them. Her eyes grew wet and she burst out laughing. A muffled, soft laugh that shook her body in spasms. She sought comfort in something certain and told herself that the earth was still turning. That their two-room apartment was turning. The square under their balcony also turned, the rivulets among its cobblestones did. She was turning too, while sitting on the bed. Anna leaning against the door jamb was. The oceans were turning and so was the trolley ready near the entrance.

I don't love you anymore, and she thought it was amazing how much harm such a simple syntactic structure could do.

«Me neither,» she replied.

Sarah Cipullo has lived in Brindisi, Milan, Siena and Edinburgh and is currently based in Turin. She writes both in Italian and English. Her work has been published in New Reader Magazine and in Fantastico!, and is forthcoming in Crack and Hook Magazine. She was selected as a finalist for the InediTO prize.