The End by Salvatore Scibona Page A

pennies and nickels,” Ciccio said. “Look up from a place of darkness to a tiny circle of light.”
    She said, “Things that little underprivileged children do.”
    “Wrong,” Ciccio said. “Cry for help. Play with the rope and the bucket.”
    Rocco said, “Things to do in a well.”

3
    T he opposite of to die is to have a family. Therefore to have no family is to be dead.
    Rocco detected a stink of turpentine and excused himself to Mrs. Marini’s lavatory, where, with her cold cream and nailbrush, he scoured his hands. He had awoken this morning convinced that his death was upon him; he’d impressed himself by being unafraid; but had he been unafraid only because, having no family, he was already dead?
    No. The name of Loveypants was Luigina. The names of his boys were Bobo, Mimmo, and Jimmy. He had a cousin Benedict still in Omaha.
    At home, he kept the door of the medicine cabinet open while he washed his hands so as not to see his image in the mirror, but Mrs. Marini’s mirror was affixed to the wall. He turned his back to it while he abraded his fingers. Then, lest he splatter cold cream on the tile, he knelt and continued his work over the commode. The three of them had carried on the whole of the afternoon, and now it was the supper hour, and the racket outside was beckoning them toward the bedlam of the feast.
    He flushed. While turning to face the sink, he regarded a grommet on his right shoe, and then, while rinsing his hands, he watched the chrome flange of the drain. But this did not keep him from seeing his arms and stomach at the edge of his vision in the mirror. What did it matter if his hands weren’t clean? It would be four days at least before he touched anybody else’s food. (Oh, but there was all that bread and the onion pastries that were rising in the walk-in at his store; the whole place would smell like a brewery by the time he got back in town; he’d have to go back and throw them out; labor, treasure, purpose—wasted; gloom.) He touched the bathroom doorknob and then turned it courageously. A firecracker exploded in the alley.
    Who was this man he became when he emerged from solitude into the company of other people? The hallway smelled of mothballs and was dark, and he felt his private self recede as he approached the bickering in the kitchen.
    Ciccio said, “Fine, but if we’d only focused the whole invasion on Montreal in 1812 the continent would have been ours.”
    Rocco wanted to turn around, to turn in. He paused in the hallway, solitude at his back, society ahead, feeling ensnared in this middle place, feeling he’d spent his whole life in this hallway and wishing at least for the next couple of hours to be all in the bathroom or all in the street wholeheartedly. I can’t go into the one place, I can’t go into the other, he said to his heart. A sneeze began to overtake him, and he succumbed to it.
     
    Here it was— bam bam bam —the smoke in the streets, ninety-one degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, a boy in a window throwing an egg down at the masses and then a goldfish and then ice cubes. Every half block a man was bent over a box of coals as the sweat dripped and hissed on the pig flesh on the grill, and a woman at his side with cockeyed brown teeth took the money and rolled from time to time a pop bottle over his face. A Rican-looking kid falling out of a tree. There was the stench of animal flesh on fire and human flesh expelling salt and toxins from its pores. A kid climbing a gutter pipe attached to the façade of the church. Everywhere you looked there were children trying to climb things, maybe hoping to get out by way of up, then falling or sliding down like when an earwig is trapped in a bathtub. Kids climbing the backstop of the ball field behind the convent where the carnival rides were parked, kids on the roof of the new pet store scaling the gigantic birdcage that housed a man-sized fiberglass parakeet. The pavement in places was not visible for the bingo