The bored and neighboring children were held
together by a kind of glue—pasty white snowfall
heavier than any cold father’s glare at Midsummer
when his luscious arbors were used as ladders.
It was January when Silencío de Cadadía
was out hunting in the magic of the country,
the plush coming to earth, all slush, never relenting.
Igloos and trenches dug for iceball warfare,
the babies were sure of themselves in their violence.
Mothers are always glad for the chance to sleep
while the children sink thigh deep into the earth.
The ground was hungry for accidents,
the jolt of slippering into the mushy pack
gave immediate way to their need to make urine.
No child wanted to run home hopping, so nearby
privacy was necessary. It was better than going
in your pants where you would be discovered.
Silencío’s child Bravissima de Cadadía squatted
in a patch of frost to the north of the alley, the steam
splaying out from all sides of her thighs.
Then she broke hurtling through the fragile ice
into the cavern of Lucio de Bonaventura’s deep well.
Lit up and splashing with sudden sunlight it received
the child screaming and tumbling to a sickening crack
of all her bones like a chicken’s neck unto a limpness
approaching death, where she lay in freezing shallows.
In the cooking of snails a large pot is used
where water filled with wine, stock,
and large onions is brought to a rolling boil.
Salt rounds the rim of the pot. Live snails
are thrown in. Some climb the onions
and consume them frantically. Some attempt
to escape, only to be driven back by the sea salt.
Eventually, they all fall.
Bravissima measured time as a doomed snail in the pot,
the freezing water was too savage a thing to tame.
Tenacious, even she could not escape.
So she fell fast asleep.
Bravissima came to her father in a waking dream
while he sought her in the dead watches.
Silencío de Cadadía had nothing left to give.
His wife, Persephone was unimpressed with the day’s events.
She smiled on, and began to work, because she had to.
We must imagine her happy.
