By Beth Gilstrap
On her last day in an unfamiliar city, she imagines her name is Valentina, her hair longer than it has been since she was nineteen, her skin, less freckled. By noon, the breeze wafts garlic and wood smoke. She towers above a man pushing a cart filled with roasted chestnuts. A tin scoop tied to the handle clanks as he hobbles along. He stops to flirt with three young women taking selfies at one of a hundred fountains tucked in the alleyways. This one for the Mother. This one for the lion. This one for the goddess of the underworld—all death and flowers. They wave him off as harmless, dotting the air around him with kisses. He rubs his thick hands together. Beautiful, beautiful, he says, reaching out to them in prayer. Valentina makes her way to the square crowned with a fountain at each end, picking a spot on the smaller of the two. She keeps her headphones in but turns the music off and pulls a scarf from her bag to cover her hair. For the first time in an age, the sun is too hot on her scalp. Children crowd around the man blowing gargantuan bubbles, giggling when they rupture and suds keep flying, flying at their feet. A street musician takes a deep breath, cradling his violin, and begins to play. The song is less mournful than any string piece she might recognize. It flits itself into an infectious mood and a well-dressed grandmother reaches up to her granddaughter for help standing from her bench. Once she’s up, they get a better grasp on each other and situate themselves into a slow, cackling waltz. Valentina tells herself not to close her eyes, to notice their matching dimples, to plot her path back to joyful, touched shoulders.
Beth Gilstrap is the winner of the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize for her second full-length collection Deadheading & Other Stories (forthcoming 2021). She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She serves as Fiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths and a reader at Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been selected as Longform.org’s Fiction Pick of the Week and recently selected by Dan Chaon for inclusion in the Best Microfiction Anthology. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Minnesota Review, Hot Metal Bridge, and Wigleaf, among others.