Poverella's Pie - The Abject

The husband liked his cherry crostatas on Thursday evenings. So, the wife started baking at midday.

In the red oak kitchen filled with bottles of jam, pickled radish and sugo prepared in January from when the days were warmer – she donned a twee floral apron and switched on Rai Radio to muffle the breathing of the child in the other room. Her swollen, sun-blotched hands worked floured ingredients into a yellow pastry, buttery and dense. The dough chilled in the refrigerator as the woman pitted fresh amarena cherries with a sharp paring knife, a fisherman gutting its catch. Methodically, she sliced and scraped each fruit until there was nothing left to take; just the way her mother had instructed. Until her fingertips were stained ruby-red, like her engagement heirloom. Red like blood.

When Damiana was just a girl, her Mamma taught her all sorts of dishes to suit a husband’s taste. Roast potatoes drenched in goose fat, crostatas and coffee after supper. Maintain your composure, never raise your voice in an argument and never, never run for the bus.

“These are the things a husband likes.” she said.

Around dining room tables or bubbling saucepans, the mother would sing an old wives’ tale:

The poverella is the poor woman; alone

She spills and cracks all over the home

The poverella unravels into pieces,

Like a hollow womb, she folds and creases

Poverella dissolves into the air,

Fragmented and ruined; no one will care.

“Does anybody care?” Damiana whispered to herself, the words sickly and sticky on her tongue.

She cut up the cherries harder, faster until the fruit puree resembled what she imagined her own blown out brains would look like. Until the knife slipped from her sweaty palm and slashed off her finger. Her ring finger. The one that wore the ruby ring.

For a moment she simply stared at the severed digit as it turned the flat grey of uncooked shrimp and involuntarily spasmed about the chopping board like some dismembered reptilian tail. The woman’s vision blurred with unshed tears, and she took a sharp intake of breath; prepared to wail and weep.

Instead, she laughed.

Hysterically. Euphorically. Arguably a little disturbingly.

As coagulated blood, thick and gelatinous, dripped down her arm and out of the severed finger, Damiana threw her head backwards and howled in the most unladylike of ways, tears rolling freely down her cheek. Inexplicably, the woman felt no pain at all; only an intense exhilaration that the damned ring, a noose around a prisoner’s neck, would never be worn again.

It was obvious the wound was beyond surgical repair; the cut was all jagged and the finger festered in the dirtied, edible mess. She thought it would be such a shame, after all these years, to let the finger go to waste.

And so, she wrapped her wound in a gingham tea towel, set aside the ring, scooped up the meaty finger and carefully diced skin and bones into bite sized pieces, almost indistinguishable amongst all the red. To simmer down and stew away in the saucepan. To be served in the cherry jam.

“I think I’ll call it Poverella’s Pie!” she named her vile creation.

For Damiana knew, no matter how terrible life had become, her husband would always have room for seconds.