Colosseum by Simone Sarasso

taking a breath.
    He has covered the whole length of the
decumanus
, the main street running east to west, and is reaching the edge of the town. But the heat is unbearable, the ash is everywhere, dead bodies litter the ground like wooden automatons in need of repair.
    He is afraid, the damned Briton. He will have to die in this land of merciless flames, never again to see the grassy lands where he came into this world. Fire in his head, fire in his eyes, salt on his skin and terror, terror filling all things.
    The end is just around the corner. The end is the next barred door.
    He breaks down the entrance of a workshop with his shoulder, hoping to find a jug of water to empty onto his head, but instead he finds that fate has a fine fucking sense of humor: a blacksmith’s furnace stares back at him from the corner of the room. Loaded with more hot embers than he has ever seen.
    After all that running, Verus is back where he started.
    Iron and flame, like the night of the massacre.
    Strength and hope desert him, he falls to his knees, ready to embrace the red death while screaming at the top of his lungs—in any case, there will be no one to hear him.
    Then, a moment before slipping into unconsciousness among the fumes and the sulfur, he hears it. The sound of salvation, the hand stretched out on the edge of the cliff, the oasis in the desert.
    A horse neighing.
    Splendid, magnificent, sonorous. A lament, pleading for exactly the same thing as him: freedom.
    Verus looks out the back of the workshop, where a panicked steed is pawing at the ground, its saddle tied to a stake driven into the earth. Next to the beast lies its dead master, suffocated by the fumes, horribly yellowed eyes wide open.
    Verus unties the animal and climbs onto it. The horse is desperate to get out of there, breaking into gallop without even waiting for a slap on its flank.
    The way is not easy; the monster of magma and flaming boulders is loosing its last salvos, and it strikes hard. More than once the Briton has to convince the horse to swerve suddenly in order to avoid breaking a leg. It is so hot his skin burns, even the horse’s hooves begin to smoke, but the animal does not stop.
    It runs, and runs some more.
    Out of the city, through the woods, the clouds, heading north, hungry for fresh air.
    Neither one of them has any intention of letting go, Verus pushes the beast beyond its limits and rides for hours.
    It is evening when he spots the headland at Misenum and the people’s faces, pink and pearled with sweat, tell him a tale of salvation.
    Verus does not know it, but as he slides from the horse’s back, at the wharf where the Imperial fleet bobs calmly and helplessly at its moorings, as he collapses to the ground unconscious, after one last glimpse of the distant monster, itself now tired of vomiting fury, he is less than a hundred paces from the house of Pliny, known to posterity as “the Younger.”
    The young man has not moved from the terrace all day. The horror had slowly worked its way into him. He was the first to hear the people’s stories, standing on tiptoes to get a clearer view of the unfolding horror. Slowly, Pliny allowed the idea of death to sink into his heart, and at dusk he finally began to weep, when an unspeakable thought began mercilessly to shake his soul. Only when night had fallen did he consent to return inside the house, upon the insistence of his mother, worried by his strange obsession for the dark things of the world.
    Pliny bid farewell as went to his bed, not knowing whom he was bidding it to or why.
    In the exact same moment as he finds relief in the arms of Morpheus, the uncle who bears his name is taking his last breath on a lonely beach smothered in ash, once again flailing impotent before the wrath of the gods.
    Finally, Vulcan sleeps. Tomorrow morning, the Gulf will awaken to discover that the mountain has been transformed.
    After this day, Vesuvius will no longer have the same