All the Lost Places by Amanda Dykes

Author:Amanda Dykes [Dykes, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction;FIC042030;FIC042110;FIC027200
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

26

Daniel

I couldn’t sleep that night. I worked at translating, and worked some more, but it was oddly the story that had caught the boy’s attention in the campo that kept waking me. Pinocchio, the puppet, who wished to be real.

It was a fairy tale. The stuff of imagination. Written for children.

Not convicts.

So why did it rouse my old shackles from their silence and keep me from sleep?

Why did it seem to shine a light upon all the money I’d earned, restitution I’d made, jars I’d left upon porches? Why did it do this and seem to carve them into caricature, puppet-like, and clatter like a hollow-boned marionette? I had seen paintings in the Doge’s Palace and the biblioteca where the artists placed shadows against light dramatically, causing the subject of the paintings to shine as in a spotlight, taking on an almost dimensional presence. Chiaroscuro, they called this method.

It would seem that Venice was intent on using this same technique on me. Illuminating things I would rather leave well buried.

I would go mad in this room if I stayed.

I threw open the window, hoping for a Garbin or a Tramontana to blow in and throw a cold veil over these thoughts. Instead, I was met with the sight of the basilica’s dome, its silver-grey tones muted in moonlight, the silhouette of Saint George standing proud in statue form atop. George, who was said to have saved a girl from a dragon.

He smote me. As if he knew all about me.

Throwing on my jacket, I opened the door and stepped out, something shuffling as my foot hit it.

It was a package, wrapped in brown paper and written in a scrolling hand—Vittoria’s.

Don’t forget the end of the story.

And then, below that, in firmer hand that I recognized from Jacopo’s boat:

And don’t forget your brickwork tomorrow! Jacopo will take you. Or else!

Opening the package, I beheld a well-loved volume of Pinocchio and laughed. Flipping through the pages, I saw snatches of the wooden puppet’s journey—his attempts to become a real boy through striving to do well and the winding roads that diverted him from that hope for so long until, at last, he returned home, humbled and loved and ready to love well.

On the last page was the image of a boy, awaking in his bed to see the wooden puppet, lifeless in a chair.

He was a real boy—in fact, a new creation, entirely. It was not his striving bones that had become real.

My own bones felt stiff, lifeless within me. I clapped the book shut, placed it in my room, and made my way outside into the night. Here, all was quiet. This isle, though only just across the canal’s expanse from the heart of Venice, felt a world away.

A haven graced, just now, with the trailing and melancholy chanting from within, the monks up for their nightly vigil and song. The sound drew me. I entered the doors of the white basilica and found myself standing upon a floor of deep red and beige parquet, leading the way in their diamond-points like arrows to an altar ahead.

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