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Pastiche
Pastiche
Pastiche
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Pastiche

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In her stories, Lucille Bellucci covers the world, where she has lived, with her peculiar off-center view. Her humor is a just treatment of comedy, and no one can deliver a grim look at history as she has lived it. Eight of Bellucci's stories and essays have won first-place awards. You can see her thoughts, action, and inner tremors. They are unrehearsed Life.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 29, 2012
ISBN9781301318285
Pastiche
Author

Lucille Bellucci

I was born in Shanghai, China, exiled by the commies in 1952, went to Italy with my family. After five years we emigrated to the U.S. Ten years after that, I moved to Brazil with my husband, Renato. Back in California in 1980, I began writing. I have five novels: The Year of the Rat, Journey from Shanghai, Stone of Heaven, The Snake Woman of Ipanema, A Rare Passion; and two story/essay collections, Pastiche: Stories and Such and Farrago: More Stories. Eight short stories and essays earned first-place awards. One story, "Cicadas," was nominated for the 2013 Pushcart Prize.

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    Book preview

    Pastiche - Lucille Bellucci

    Pastiche

    By Lucille Bellucci

    Smashwords Edition

    Copyright © 2012 by Lucille Bellucci

    Back of jacket: Photo by Therese Pipe

    Stories previously published in:

    Winters of the Heart Timber Creek Review

    The Czarina’s Man Northcoast View

    Carioca Dobie Derby A DOG’s WORLD, Anthology, Traveler’s Tales

    Circle of Rage The Taos Review

    Obi Yellow Silk

    A Single Woman Conversely.com First-Place Award

    Write Me a Letter Ceilidh First-Place Award

    A Soochow Story www.goodgoshalmighty.com

    Permanence is a Language Roberts Writing Awards

    Favors and Other Crimes Dana Literary

    Cicadas the new renaissance First-Place Louise T. Reynolds Memorial Fiction Award

    Novels by Lucille Bellucci:

    The Snake Woman of Ipanema

    The Year of the Rat

    Journey from Shanghai

    Stone of Heaven

    e-book: A Rare Passion

    Table Of Contents

    WINTERS OF THE HEART

    THE CZARINA’S MAN

    THE MURPH

    THE CARIOCA DOBIE DERBY

    THE CIRCLE OF RAGE

    OBI

    A SINGLE WOMAN

    WRITE ME A LETTER

    SALT HAS ANOTHER SETBACK PENNANT IS OURS!

    FIVE HAIKU

    PLATEAUS OF PARANA’

    LULLABY

    A SOOCHOW STORY

    PERMANENCE IS A LANGUAGE

    THE DEED

    HIM, HER, US

    FAVORS AND OTHER CRIMES

    CICADAS

    WINTERS OF THE HEART

    Gerald looked thoughtfully at the long pearl hatpin piercing the doll’s breast. With thumb and forefinger, disliking its ugliness, he picked up the rag figure. He recognized the striped kitchen toweling that had been rolled into a sausage for the body. A piece of string both strangled a neck and formed a head. Eyes, nose, were roughly penciled on the knob of a face. The stitched-on limbs of felt cloth had jagged chips glued to their ends—fingernail and toenail clippings, he supposed. The hair was string, fastened on top by a safety pin.

    He hadn’t been inside the place in five years, and was disgusted by its slovenly condition. Irritably, he had tumbled empty pots and pushed over sacks of mulch (wondering at the same time how Alice had managed to haul three twenty-pound sacks from her station wagon to the shed in the back).

    A board had slid off a five-gallon clay pot; inside sat the doll, like a mandrake root in clothing.

    He remembered another doll like it. Twenty years ago, on a quest for an exotic vacation and after spending two uncomfortable nights at a hotel in Port-au-Prince where Alice kept hearing lizards scampering across the ceiling, they had moved to a modest room in the home of a Methodist missionary from Tennessee. Amid the clutter on his desk they had noticed a handmade rag doll. Gerald thought its stained cotton garment and crude string hair repugnant. For days Haiti’s poverty had reproached him wherever he looked; it depressed him to see a toy no better off than the child who must have owned it. The children all had huge hungry eyes and swollen bellies, which were lighter-colored (like balloons stretching the rubber, thought Gerald) than their skinny black faces and limbs. Their sick livers would probably afflict them all their brief lives.

    Alice had asked about the doll on the missionary’s desk.

    It’s not a toy, the cleric replied, his face turning a dull pink. "It’s a, what you might call, a hex, a voodoo doll. I found one of my parishioners, an owner of a small radio shop, making a spell over it. He wouldn’t tell me who or what it was for, but I knew about a feud he had with a neighbor. This man never missed a day of Sunday school.

    From that day on I have felt quite useless here. If I were to close my mission this very morning, I am sure that by midnight there will be a drum ceremony right here in my yard. There’d be the whole thing—a priestess sacrificing black cocks and women in white shaking themselves and spinning around and around a bonfire. His expression was ironic, self-mocking. As you see, I am still here, and I don’t ask questions anymore.

    Yet Haiti held an appeal for Gerald and Alice. Knowing they would probably never return, their sensory pores opened wide. The tropic nights were as starry as a movie set, and actually did resound faintly with drumbeats.

    So corny, Alice said. If we lived here the romantic thing would be for you to drink yourself to death. And I’d have an affair with the priest.

    Gerald was intent on getting the hammock’s upswing to tip gin-and-tonic into his mouth. No, you wouldn’t. You’d go crazy for my wrinkled white linen suits. Women die for that dissipated look in men. I’d make a very good dissipated sort.

    Haiti aroused powerful erotic impulses in them; he wouldn’t have been surprised if Alice conceived a child during those hot nights under their mosquito net. It was a new experience to lie spraddle-legged on moist bedding, with nothing but the sweat on their skins for cover, and wordlessly play with each other’s body. Their membranes were slippery, turgid, it seemed, all the time. But she didn’t get pregnant until they had been back in New England a year.

    There was not much to do in Haiti. They went driving along the western coast and walked aimlessly around Mole Saint-Nicolas, accumulating a train of beggar children, until they gave up and went back to their car. About five miles out of the village, Gerald had to stop. The road was blocked with men, women, children, and police; all were looking at something in a ditch. Gerald got out and peered down. He saw, though a cloud of shiny green flies, the naked trunk of a black man. The head and limbs lay a few feet from the trunk. Every body part was hacked partly through, the joints of arms and legs cracked open and slick as soup bones. Flesh and intestines still smoked from a bonfire that someone, the police perhaps, had scattered. Gerald realized he was breathing shallowly, through his nostrils.

    A policeman was staring at him, or Gerald thought he was, because glasses of a blackness he associated with the blind covered the man’s eyes. What happened? Gerald asked. I mean, why...?

    The black reflecting lenses stayed fixed in his direction, and finally the policeman, a handsome man with square jaws and blue-black skin, replied in a mixture of French and English, Werewolf. They cut and burn him so he cannot come back. He pointed at a straw bag and a slaughtered cock in the ditch. The bag has charms. He will not come back.

    Gerald heard someone gagging and turned to see Alice with her hand over her mouth. He led her away, back to the car, but she kept looking over her shoulder at the mess in the ditch.

    The next day they left—almost fleeing—Haiti and flew home to Connecticut. Compared to Port-au-Prince, Old Saybrook’s cool summer was friendly and welcoming, but he found himself counting people in the streets. He had never noticed before that there were more cars than pedestrians, and those were usually parked, seemed never to be leaving or arriving. Main Street had a secluded, self-satisfied air, and no man or woman looked at him sidelong as he passed.

    He was one of them; but Gerald began to be sensitive to remarks such as, We’re not from around here. We’re from New Hampshire, meaning that the tiny distance between New Hampshire and Connecticut was really a chasm. The complacency of it bothered him. He guessed it was because he no longer felt safe, that everyone was living in a delusion of permanence. Nobody understood that just six hours by air to the south was a tortured people, a colony of protozoa bursting apart and liable to surge across the strip of water to multiply in new, American tissues. He thought that one day New Hampshire and Connecticut would band together as twin siblings in the new world to come.

    He didn’t think that Haiti had affected Alice at all. She went right back to her Guilford Stone House Restoration Society and the Ivoryton Playhouse in Essex without much more than a reminiscence now and then about their queer vacation.

    He wondered about that, as he held the kitchen-towel doll hidden in the potting shed. She can’t even draw the eyes right, he thought. Four years of that stupid workshop at Annie Hart’s and she still can’t draw eyes. He didn’t doubt that it was his wife who had made the crude object, since she was the only one who ever used the shed. She was always in it or worked near it with her eternal cuttings or sickly transplants. He had to insist that she scrub under her fingernails with a stiff sisal brush before touching meats; despite her hands getting red to the point of rawness, Gerald blamed the gardening for their condition.

    He heard muffled rumblings coming from the garage. She was back from her shopping. Feeling like an overgrown playmate, he put the doll back in the pot and the board on top, then laboriously, with pain shooting to his head, righted the things he had tipped over on the floor. He thought about asking her about it and knew, as surely as his knees wanted to turn backward whenever he took a step, that she was going to start, and blush, and stammer excuses.

    It took him five minutes to climb the six steps to the patio. Tiles were treacherous. Even rubber-tipped walking sticks skidded and took you into a (half-second of expectant death) splaying fall with them, if they weren’t placed squarely on a surface. He stepped high over the doorsill into the house, neat, straight-edged house so different from Alice’s potting shed.

    She was putting away groceries when he hobbled into the kitchen. Her pale blond hair touched her shoulders and curved outward in subtle semblance

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