Headstone City by Tom Piccirilli

carved away the fat and got to the heart of matters. Little laughter when he thought about it, but that didn't mean there'd been bitterness. Or even anger, really. At least not before Ma got sick.
    Dane found that there had always been a strange equilibrium between calm and violence. Or maybe it was just him.
    Grandma cleared her throat, and he could tell she had subjects to broach. Things she needed to get out, but hoping he'd be the one to start.
    It wasn't easy. The house already felt like it was pressing in on him. He could sense the remaining tensions of those who'd lived and died there. Mostly in stillness, but with loud, abandoned thoughts.
    His father, a hard man of imperfect justice. His mother, a mere suggestion that dwelled in the house, unseen but still obvious, often coughing. His grandmother, a Sicilian witchy lady of sorts, a soothsayer who didn't soothe. It was her way. At nine, she'd seen the Virgin Mary in an olive grove outside Messina, in the shadow of Mount Etna. She told her local priest, who had burned her with sulfur for speaking with the devil's tongue. You heard about stuff like that and you understood why she loved chapels but hated churches.
    Since then, she'd had dreams that gave her a glimpse through the thinnest part of the veil. They informed her of what was happening, who might be visiting Dane from the other side. She called it the burden but didn't treat it as such. It had been passed to him like a rock. Now he had to find out how much she already knew.
    Dane still couldn't stop looking at her hair, thinking, Jesus, the hell did she do to herself?
    She noticed him staring and slid a hand over the bangs, primping them. “It's magenta.”
    “Oh,” he said. “Is that right?”
    “Matches my nail polish. You look like you've got something to say.”
    “It just takes a little getting used to.”
    “You shut up.”
    She uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured two glasses. He ate, sipped, and looked around the table at the remaining chairs, empty except for the muscular weight of memory.
    “So, this is what I changed your diapers for?” she said, trying to sound heartbroken but not even coming close.
    “What?”
    “Raised you for? Fed you for all these years? So you could sit and not say a word to me, like I was the DA?”
    “You told me to shut up.”
    “I didn't mean it.”
    “I'm just gathering my thoughts.”
    She pressed a piece of sausage onto his plate, motioned with her fork for him to eat more. “You put that girl out of your mind yet?”
    “It's not about that so much, at the moment,” he admitted.
    “What, then? All the talk about Vincenzo Monticelli coming to put a double tap in your brain”—reaching over to thunk him twice on the head, where the scars lay hidden beneath his hairline, everybody clunking him in the head—“you can forget about it for now. You take it one step at a time, plan it through, then when you start moving you don't stop until it's finished. You can do it.”
    Telling him, pretty much outright, that she expected him to go against the mob and clean house. Take them all out, one way or another. That easy. Come home afterward and she'd have garlic bread waiting.
    She didn't say it without reservation, or fear, or even love. But there was a controlled fervor in her voice, the same kind that had been in his father's voice, often devoid of sentiment. His old man used to put it down on the line, with an acute conviction, and once you figured out what you had to do, no matter what it was, you just went and did it.
    “It's only him and his brother and maybe a little extra muscle,” Grandma continued, spooning more ravioli onto his plate. “Three or four guys maybe. No more than, say, six. Joey Fresco and Tommy Bartone are the only old-school hitters. Maybe ten guys. You're not going up against the whole family, think of it that way. A dozen, tops.”
    He used to wonder if he could do what she'd done, cleaning factory floors all day long, every