Ardor

Ardor by Lily Prior Page A

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Authors: Lily Prior
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covered in them, and I looked around at my back with interest. They were in my eyelashes, in my ears, and in my nostrils, causing me to sneeze. Concetta Crocetta, too, was swathed in them. Her uniform was dappled. Her cap was laden. They were in her hair, her face, her mouth. The ground around us was a snowdrift of down. It was incredible. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it.
    At the same moment we both began to laugh. Although we had lived and worked together for twenty years, since the very day she had come to our region, Concetta Crocetta had never heard me laugh before. She was so surprised, and delighted, that it made her laugh all the more, and the more she laughed, the more so did I. We stood there in the humble yard of the Fondis united by the strange phenomenon and by a moment of the most perfect joy.
    Still the feathers swirled like dancing snowflakes, and through them, blinking away the ones that had gathered in her eyelashes, Concetta Crocetta saw the approach of Dr. Amilcare Croce. Her heart rippled.
    â€œAmazing!” he shouted while still at a distance, juggling piles of the fluff in his hands. “I’ve read about it, of course, rains of feathers, but never experienced it for myself.”
    â€œPerhaps it’s connected with that strange singing in the night. Did you hear it out at Montebufo?”
    â€œCertainly did. Strange thing. Caused uproar.” Living practically as a recluse as he did, the doctor had somewhat lost the niceties of conversation, and until he warmed up and got going, he tended to speak in short, spiky sentences, reflectors of his impatient thoughts. “Beasts marching in a line along the hilltops; farmers struggling to turn them back; emergency Masses held in the fields. Superstitious nonsense of course. Must be a perfectly rational explanation for it.”
    Dr. Croce’s voice tailed off; the apple cheeks of Concetta Crocetta had never looked so lovely as they did then, glowing with joy and laughter and health in the rising light. Amilcare Croce, with a glimmer in his eyes, and feathers in his salt-and-pepper hair, seemed transformed into the medical student he once was, as captured in the faded photograph that had pride of place on his desk.
    I had stopped laughing now, and looking at the doctor out of the sides of my eyes, I moved away, the clopping of my hooves muffled by the carpet of fluff. At my delicacy the doctor and thenurse felt suddenly embarrassed and looked for the world like two gawky teenagers.
    â€œEverything all right?” He nodded toward the house, predictably taking refuge behind medical matters when they were in danger of becoming personal.
    â€œFine,” she answered shortly, aware of the spell being broken, a snapped thread.
    â€œMind if I take a look?”
    â€œNot at all.”
    â€œBye, then.”
    â€œBye.”
    And he was gone. Wading though the swathes of feathers that were already beginning to melt into nothingness. Crocetta Concetta clicked open her bag, and taking a vial from within, she carefully gathered up some of the few that remained as a keepsake. As we rode back toward the town, the sun came up, and aside from the contents of the little bottle and the cherished memories of the three of us, no trace of the phenomenon of the feather rain remained.
    Â 
    Tragically, the doctor and the nurse had never been able to hold a conversation without the most terrible awkwardness on either side. And although in theory they had worked together for the past twenty years when both had arrived in the region, quite by chance on the same day, fresh-faced and freshly qualified, the reality was that they were never more than ships that passed in the night.
    Dr. Croce lived alone at Montebufo, a distance of some twenty kilometers from our town, and although in the ordinary course of events this would not prove too significant a barrier to the successful execution of his duties, Dr. Croce was a singular man. His refusal

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