Below, the beginning of Domini's new novel, A Tomb on the Periphery, to appear in late April 2008 on Gival Press.

A TOMB ON THE PERIPHERY

FIRST EVENING

It wasn’t midnight yet, to judge from the moonlight, the clarity it gave to the exposed skeleton. The bones of the lone uncovered arm glistened. Anyone could see, though the limb was folded tight at the elbow, mummy-style, that the interred hadn’t yet reached full size. The skull and shoulder looked to be adolescent. Most of the corpse remained under the dirt, since for a discovery like this the dig crew worked with teaspoons, with watercolor brushes. But the visible bits might’ve been some subterranean neon, more tawny than white, its electricity uncovered while still abuzz. Also you could make out just a wink of tomb jewelry.

Or you could so long as the moon hung postcard-full. Already however Fabbrizio understood he’d made a terrible mistake. Terrible, sicuro.

Didn’t he know better? Fabbrizio wasn’t the kind of crook who put himself in harm’s way. He didn’t think of himself as a crook at all, never mind the sardonic jabs he heard from his older brother. A crook was one of those nuts out of Quentin Tarantino, a guy who spent half the movie with a gun to his head. Hadn’t he proved himself smarter than that, Fabbro? He’d confined himself to the technical end, an artisan rather than a thug, and the intricacy and heart he put into his “black work” surely mitigated the venality of the black marketplace (though he couldn’t say just how, and he knew better than to try that argument on his brother). Nonetheless here he stood, down in the illegal dirt, with plenty of light in his face. If he were caught now, he’d be in another sort of movie, one of those Hollywood teen-sex comedies, and his role would be the doofus virgin surprised with his pants around his ankles. He’d gotten himself into this mess because of a woman -- an American.

“What is it, Fabbrizio?” she asked now. She knew her interrogative Italian, the accent on the verb.

Shanti was still squatting at his feet. She didn’t wait for an answer, turning away to block his view of the bones, picking at something to do with the neck and shoulders. Shanti or whoever she was, occasionally wiping off her hands with unfussy swipes at her butt. For breaking and entering, she’d pulled on a summer rain-jacket, material so light the gravedirt slid off the sleeves. Beneath that however his accomplice wore a tank top that appeared better suited for a lipstick ad, clingy, gleaming. Her cleavage made the moon seem like bedroom lighting. Fabbrizio could only go on staring, flabbergasted, sinking deeper into the sorry certainty that he’d never have taken such a risk for an Italian girl. If all he’d wanted was to get into some woman’s pants, he could’ve done that at any number of unpoliced nooks and crannies around the Neapolitan periphery. L’Americana however had got him to take her into a necropolis from the Greek era, still under excavation. For a place like this, security was arranged in Rome.

And it’d taken so little for her to make him crazy, hardly more than her looks and the fact of her traveling alone. She’d sunk the hook with nothing but some hippie-girl mumbo-jumbo about summoning the Goddess. For what could this “Shanti” be except a hippie girl? What else, when she’d first tracked him down in Salerno, in a mob front of a coffee bar? An Americana traveling alone, and strolling into a place like this, in a port town on the far south of the Naples periphery -- certainly it fit the profile, Fabbrizio’s overheated fantasy profile, that she’d come here with some New-Age hoodoo in mind.

Shanti had claimed she knew a ritual that would put them in touch with the Original Mother Herself. She believed she could pull off a pagan resurrection, hauling the distant past into the present density. The Goddess, that’s Who she was after: the Queen Who cradled a pomegranate. Fabbrizio hadn’t gotten the whole wild story at their first meeting, of course (and had it been only three days ago, just this past Tuesday, that she’d first walked into that Salerno bar?). Even l’Americana had seemed to understand the danger, there in the Café Sempre, a bar illegally zoned in a suburb filled with dockworkers; she’d sensed enough of a threat to rein in what she’d had to say (and wouldn’t that alone, her pouting savvy about whoever might be listening, have made him suspicious if he’d had his usual wits about him?). Rather she’d saved the more psychedelic details of her plan for her second meeting with Fabbrizio, later that same Tuesday night. They’d hooked up again across a wicker table, in Naples itself, in a rendezvous piazza she said reminded her of Greenwich Village.

Up in the old downtown Shanti had rattled on about her intended ritual freely, breathlessly. Her “sisters” everywhere, she’d declared, needed to re-encounter the Great Hag. They needed to know again the power of the Crone, a vitalizing comfort in an era when a woman’s only worth lay in her skin, her face. And Shanti had taught Fabbrizio a new piece of American slang, “fuckable.”

Myself, she’d asked, cocking her sharp, almost Arab chin to look him straight in the eye, what am I, if I’m not… ‘fuckable?’

Fabbrizio had no answer for that. As he eyed the woman he might’ve spotted a fraction of something that required no translation, a tic of angry neediness. But the insight flickered shut, he believed in what he’d glimpsed but it was over just that fast, and after that the one way out of his hesitation was to pick up a line of thought from his abandoned schoolwork. His schoolwork, plus the reading he used to do for fun. Fabbro pointed out that the First Feminine, call her Hera, call her Dione or whatever, had held onto believers well into the Christian era. Early converts to the faith out of Galilee had known better than to reject the Goddess outright, here in Campania Felix. Rather the new sect had made the old one over, transforming the womanly Demiurge and her fruit scepter into Madonna and child.

Shanti had kept nodding, the tips of her hair spider-walking along her shoulders. She’d had no reason to tie it back, that night: rich hair, full, black as the baked corpses of Pompeii. Fabbrizio wondered whether this somewhat older turista (she might’ve been 30, even) had American Indian blood (that would’ve been a first for him), or merely an ancestor from the Middle East. In fact they were talking in an open-air restaurant run by Palestinians. He’d suggested this piazza, Bellini, because here a man didn’t call attention to himself by talking to foreigners. He saw too that when excitement flushed her face, she darkened to a shade not far from red ochre, whereas Italian girls tended towards lavender. It didn’t escape his notice, either, that while this Shanti carried on about “ceremony,” about “making the unseen manifest,” she’d underscored her university Italian with prolonged touches of his knee.

His trouble-antenna, otherwise so finely tuned, wasn’t equipped for such interference. By the end of the night, she’d said, imagine the power we might unleash! Now here they stood, a long way before the end of Friday night, and it was another she-god they’d called back to life. It was the Siren, mistress of destruction.

Fiction

PLAYERS, TAWKERS, SPAWTS