This Town Has Become a Museum
Illustration by Pedro Gomes. They pulled another body from the lake last week. Sometimes it takes days to resurface, but the lake always gives back what it takes.
That bulky yellow helicopter found the boy. We call it the Canary but only for its color and flight. It doesn’t warn against death like in a coal mine; rather, it eulogizes. It sings an anti-lullaby, an agonizing keen that never wavers. It is the most foreboding of hearses because we can never tell whether it is coming or going. When the Canary passes, we stop and watch and guess. Its ominous drones shake our spirits as much as the walls of these ancient homes built before Italy was even a nation.
This town has become a museum, a memorial to what we have lost. It is a quaint Italian postcard you’d send to a relative: the cobbled stone and crumbling brick, the noisy neighbors who sing as much as
