La Luna

“I can’t sleep,” Andre said, his words drifting through the empty apartment, stagnant and unnerving, like an unwanted phantom.

He hadn’t been able to sleep for what felt like an eternity, but to the real world was probably only an hour.

He sighed and stretched across the old leather sofa he found on the side of the road, cracked and torn, like so many other things in his apartment.

His hands fumbled in the dark for a cigarette.

They always had a way of numbing his senses.

His fingers closed around one, slightly smushed, in the crack between cushions.

This would have to do for now.

The lighter opened with a snap and a small flame illuminated the dark room in an eerie glow. Clothes littered the ground like candy wrappers, and flakes of cigarettes sat in his ash tray like broken moth wings.

Newspapers and bills were scattered across the coffee table, and his mattress lay in the corner without a frame.

He couldn’t go to the furniture store, not after all this time. Not when one of his exes was employed there.

Then again there might be a chance that her prospects had lightened up a bit. After all, it had been ten years since he last saw her.

But still, he couldn’t let go of that excuse. Excuses to him were something of a hobby. A hobby he had become excessively good at over the years. So good it had become a habit more than anything.

Smoke curled from the end of his cigarette and twirled into the air above like white ribbon.

His Pops hated that he smoked. It’ll send you to an early grave, Cipolloto!

And maybe that was for the better.

He had tried to quit several times, but it never worked.

The smoke filled his lungs and clouded his mind with a sweet numbness that always left him unsatisfied.

He couldn’t bear the thought of getting rid of another small pleasure life had offered to him.

His eyes were beginning to drift asleep, when the window shutters banged open with a clatter.

He jolted upwards, choking on some smoke.

His nerves softened when he saw it was only the moonlight spilling through the open window and not a robber.

He sighed, getting to his feet-that still wore his shoes from work.

Stepping over his crinkled chef uniform he would never wear again, his fingers folded over the shutters.

His heart lifted slightly at the sight of the rooftops sparkling silver under the diamond moon.

Beautiful.

Relighting his cigarette, he sat on the small ledge that looked out onto the city of Venice. Roads pathed by silver water curled around each corner, lapping at buildings like lonely dogs waiting to be let in by their masters.

He leaned back, blowing a cloud of gray smoke above him.

Soon the moon would disappear to be replaced by the sun.

In other words: It would be tomorrow. A new day. Or as he thought of it, another day. Another day to let his soul drip from his grasp, like blood from an unstitched wound.

The phone on the opposite wall shrilled, startling him, as though someone had knocked down the front door.

He sighed, pushing back his blond hair.

What the hell could someone want this late at night?

“What?” he rasped into the receiver.

“What do you mean what? A father can’t call his son whenever he feels like it?”

Of course it was the old man. He’d call him in the middle of a tsunami if it were possible.

“I was asleep.”

“Then how did you pick up on my first ring, eh?”

He scrunched his forehead between his fingers. “The phones right next to where I sleep.”

“On the floor with dead rats I hope!”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“I just got off the phone with Bruno. He told me you got fired from another restaurant!”

Bruno that rat.

He swore to himself. “Yeah so what if I did?”

“That’s the third time this year!” the man yelled in his ear. “What happened to becoming the greatest chef in all of Italy?!”

Andre sighed, leaning against the flaky wall. “It was all of Venice last time I checked.”

“Stronzata! Ever since you were a boy you said it was your destiny to be the greatest chef of Italy!”

“I was a boy then. Even becoming the greatest chef in Venice seems like a stretch now.”

“Have you looked at de moon tonight?”

“What does that got to do with it?”

And then he remembered. So suddenly his mouth drained from moisture.

“Well, have you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Hey Pops?” He met his father’s gaze with eyes of innocent wonder. He seemed so much stronger then. Sure, his father could still hold his own in a fight, but the invincible man he once knew was slowly fading with age.

“Yes Andre?” his Pops said under a full beard.

“Why did you name the restaurant ‘La Luna’?” They walked the deserted road of their small town, starlight the only thing that guided them.

In the summers when he was still a child he would work as a chore boy in his fathers kitchen.

“When you see de luna, what is it you think of?”

Andre looked up, eyes meeting the moon's gaze.

“An oyster,” he said after a moment of contemplation.

The older man’s husky laugh echoed through the empty street. “Of course you’d say something like that!” His father swiped a tear from his eye.

“What do you think of when you see the moon?” Andrea asked.

His father looked up, eyes filled with starlight and something bittersweet.

“Your mother,” he whispered. Andrea’s breath stilled. “She was the reason I started this restaurant. The reason I followed my dream.”

“Not because her name was Luna?”

His blond beard turned up in a smile. “That too. But she wasn’t like the moon just in her name, she also helped me through my darkness, so I could see the path before me. Just like the moon is doing now.” He continued after a moment. “I was studying to be an engineer when we met. Through her I realized that I wanted to be an engineer only because I was scared of following my dreams.”

Andre looked up at his father curiously. “Why?”

His father felt the words in his mouth as though tasting them. “Because very few people follow their dreams, Cipolloto. Life can be very lonely when you choose the path you want most, you can fail sometimes.”

“But you didn’t fail.”

“Yes, that is true. Mostly because of your mother. I couldn't have done it without her.”

“But what if you did fail? Would you have wished to go back to engineering?”

His father shook his head. “I wouldn’t wish it for the world. To pursue your dreams even when it’s hard is a beautiful thing.”

Andre felt the words in his ears as if they had just been freshly spoken. Like he was a small boy once again, holding tight to his fathers callused fingers.

His dreams?

His eyes wandered up to meet the moon's diamond gaze.

No one cared about those.

What was it to his landlord or Singora Rossi from next door, if he did or didn’t go after a childhood fantasy?

But even after his father hung up, and he sat on his windowsill, watching the stars fade into pinks and oranges, and as he caught one last glance of the moon, still he felt his fathers words echo through his mind.

“Whenever you see the moon, Cipolloto, think of your dreams,” his father whispered in his ear, like it was their secret to keep from the stars.