“Asad,” Lindsey said, “you are a fiend in the kitchen. This lamb is like butter in my mouth, we are telling everyone in the consulate!” Her plate laid cold and empty before her.

“This really may be the best thing I’ve had since I’ve been here, and I have gone out to a different place for dinner every week,” Robert said.

Asad looked at his two coworkers and smiled deeply, almost embarrassed by their deep kindness.

“Thank you my friends,” he said, standing up and collecting their plates, “I will put some coffee on.” He said it almost hoping that he could end the evening. His two office mates, Lindsey and Robert, were wonderful guests, but it was getting late, and he wanted to sleep. To think about that woman from the market today. To say her name like a pearl in the clam black of his room. Astarte. Astarte.

“In realtà prenderò un altro bicchiere di vino,” Robert said in Italian, I’ll actually have another glass of wine.

“Più vino!” confirmed Lindsey, more wine, in a way that betrayed her true tipsiness. She raised her empty glass and squeezed Robert’s thick shoulder a little too flirtatiously. Robert ran his hand over his thinning black hair and looked at Asad who was coming back to the table with a bottle of red.

The host forced a smile and put the bottle of red down in front of the two.

Asad then went over to his balcony and opened the doors so that the cool night air came into the apartment, along with the sound of the waves on the coast and the smell of salt wafting from Palermo’s shoreline.

“It’s so beautiful here,” Robert said, leaning ever so slightly towards Lindsey. She leaned forward on the table and over-confidently poured herself some more wine.

“You know I applied to this consulate job because I wanted to see the old country,” Robert said. To Asad, it sounded like he suddenly put on a thicker Staten Island Italian accent than normal.

Lindsey rolled her eyes ever so slightly, but continued to rub Robert’s shoulder.

“You have mentioned this,” Asad said, seven or eight times tonight alone, he thought. Though the criticism was true, Asad loved Robert. He was a big, warm man from New York that made him feel somewhat at home in this Palermo post.

“My family is from a little town called Randazzo, somewhere in the center of the island I think. I’m proud of that, proud to be back to where I come from. I feel like I’ve found a missing piece or something. But my grandfather was confused.” Robert let this last statement sit in the room as he took another sip of wine.

Lindsey joined him in another sip, and twirled her body to look at Robert, “like sexually?” she asked.

Asad, joining his coworkers again, sat down and looked at Robert who placed his wine down slowly and looked around the room. His eyes went furrowed and he looked at Lindsey.

“No, not confused sexually. He was a GI here. Part of the invasion of Sicily during the second world war.”

“Oh! Because he was Italian!” Lindsey said with drunken realization and a giggle. She brushed her blonde hair out of her eyes and took another sip of wine, eyeing Robert.

The three of them laughed. Asad had not realized that Italian-Americans had invaded their own old country during the war.

“This must have been confusing. I cannot imagine invading Morocco for the US,” Asad said in understanding.

“Yeah, that’s kind of how my grandfather said it. He didn’t exactly know how he felt.”

The air blew in salt to the room and they could hear the distant crashing of the waves upon the shore, smelling the tide’s change.

“He never really talked about it much to the whole family. But I remember one time―I must have been real little, or else I made it up, but I don’t think I did―I was on his lap. My folks must have needed my grandparents to babysit, and my grandmother must have run out for groceries or something. I remember him reading in this old rocking chair they had in the living room. Some big picture book spread open on his lap. The chair was creaking as he sat with his round glasses on the edge of his beak of a nose. The book had all these black and white photos inside. I remember him sitting there and rocking, his lip quietly quivering. I was just watching him in the silence of the afternoon, a little kid and all.

“I remember asking him if he was alright, and he looked up at me like he couldn’t hear me. He grabbed his handkerchief and wiped his quivering lips, but he kept staring at me like I was a hundred miles away. He closed the big book, and he tapped his lap,” Robert pantomimed the action. “That was the universal signal to get your butt on Grandpa’s lap. So I did and I looked at him. I could smell him, like rust and polished leather. His big, brown-rimmed glasses made his eyes like little planets. And he spoke to me in just a whisper:

‘I know I don’t speak of it Robbie, but I have been drowning in the waters of Sicily since 1943. The old country. Don’t you know that? You come from a little island in the center of the world called Sicily. You should know this. All good boys come from Sicily, Robbie.’”

“Is it true?” Lindsey asked, “do all good boys come from Sicily?” She giggled and Asad laughed with her. Robbie didn’t though. His eyes kept looking at the open doors that let in the sound of the ocean outside.

Asad felt a tickle on his hand and he looked down to see a large black fly dancing on his knuckles. He shooed it away.

“Well I can’t speak for all boys,” Robert said, acknowledging the comment, “but I can speak for what my grandfather said. Now this man loved Sicily. He didn’t really even like other Italians, only other Sicilians. But his eyes shook like he was in some deep pit thinking about it. I remember just sitting there all silent, listening. Kind of a little scared of him, almost wishing I could call for my grandmother or something. But he kept going, and…and he says, ‘Robbie, while we were being transported over, during the war, I saw the edge of the island, billowed in thick smoke. Like flour thrown up all over a baker’s kitchen, like ash and hell dancing in the daylight. And the boat was taking us straight to it. The fellas knew I was Sicilian. My father was off the boat, Robbie, don’t you know―that means he came right from Sicily, right from that island my ship had just fired bombs at. I was invading the very island my own father was born on. I felt like I was putting a knife in his back. Like some fraud, invading my own home.’ He kept pausing too, his eyes took him right back to that day.”

“It was like my grandfather was digging through the graves of his memory to dig up his thoughts. He told me about getting onto the island and walking through the thick smoke, the Air Force had just dropped its payload to clear the way for the infantry. They took the beachhead and started entering a village, hearing some staccato shots and pops in the distance. And he says, ‘Robbie, I can remember this one little house. We walked into it to get off the streets, off the beach. 

“‘The sun had just been rising, and the pink morning brought the light into this little brick building. It must have been there since Caesar. And inside, one of the walls was blown down. Dust was in the air, the old wooden roof was splintered all across the room. There was a…man in there.’ He had said this with a long pause. But even though he didn’t say it, I had even known then he meant a dead man. He says, ‘A―man, Robbie. The first I had really seen up close, the sunlight in his pale, dark eyes. And it could have been my father as a young man lying there. It was him, I had seen him there, Robbie. Went across the world to see him lying there.’”

Robbie stopped talking and drank his wine.

Asad stared at the fly which inched closer to his hand.

“Wow. Can you imagine that? To go back to your roots just to go to war with it? It must have done him up something awful,” Lindsey said soberly, again stroking Robert’s shoulder.

Robert just puffed his cheeks and nodded, leaning into her comfort.

“Absolutely,” Asad said, feeling Robert’s story heavily. He didn’t think he could turn on the country of his heritage like that. But perhaps he could if Morocco had spawned a horrible dictator that had started a world war. 

“While I was sitting on his lap, he lifted that big book of photos and opened it up. He pointed at this picture of himself as a young man in his army uniform. He goes, ‘Jeez, Robbie, a handsome man, eh? If only you were related to him!’”

The three coworkers laughed to sweep the melancholy out of the room, to dust it out onto the balcony and into the ancient ocean outside.

“But my grandfather swore he had seen crazy things in Sicily. I was on his lap for a long time before my grandmother got home that day. He told me time was a funky thing in Sicily. It felt ancient and instant in the same moment, like you were in one century for one second and in the present the next. He swore he saw a Roman centurion running down the middle of Catania in 1943. He swore he saw Moorish warriors praying to Mount Etna and Normans raiding the coastline while he was there. Now, I was a boy and maybe he was making it up, but I think he’s right about seeing funky things in Sicily. It seems the place for it.”

“I know the feeling,” Lindsey chimed in. “Everytime I go into a shop around here, there’s a moment where I feel like I’m in the eighth century, that everyone is in ancient robes or something, and then the fog clears and I see a tattooed person on an iPhone roll their eyes at me thinking I am some dumb American who can only speak English.”

“It is a great feeling to speak Italian to a local who thinks you are a foreigner,” Asad agreed with a big, white smile. The three snickered in agreement.

The fly buzzed around Asad’s head.

Lindsey poured herself more wine.

“Yeah. I try to explain it to my sons back home,” Lindsey said, “but they don’t pick up the phone. Or when they do, they don’t care. Do you try calling your wife, Asad?”
Asad paused for a moment as his two guests looked at him. He had hardly heard Lindsey’s words, they came out garbled to him and his eyes were focused on that fat, black fly buzzing around the table.

“I have not experienced what you say about the time, Lindsey,” is all he responded with. “Regarding your confusion as to what century it is here. Maybe you have had too much wine?” Asad said, looking back now at her arm sensually rubbing Robert’s neck. 

“I don’t know what he meant,” Robert confirmed, “I think he just got confused with all these ancient buildings around here. And, like I said, I was a kid.”

Asad’s eyes shifted over to the sword he had placed in the corner of his living room. The ancient thing which had survived over a thousand years of Italian dirt just to be in his hands. In the of a Moor again. Maybe he had felt a tinge of time slip away from him when his hands were on it. He had the same feeling when he saw that beautiful woman. Astarte. He stared at the sword over in its corner, and he saw a black fly buzz over onto the ornate hilt.

“Your grandfather,” Asad started, looking at Robert, “he felt time shift while he was here? Did he say when?” Asad asked.

Robert looked down at his empty glass and made a face of deep thought. “You know, he actually said something… I can’t quite remember it. But it was something about how this one woman made him second guess everything he did. She was beautiful. Living in a hovel or something. A life of rags. He said they just made eye contact while he was walking through. He said he thought the women were tougher fighters than any of the men. But even I could tell you that. You should never cross a Sicilian, but you won’t survive crossing a Sicilian woman.”

Lindsey laughed loudly at that one. “It’s funny, my Polish grandmother said something like that about her country.”

The conversation began to dwindle down and wine glasses were filled and emptied again. Robert insisted on helping clean the table, and Lindsey fell asleep in her chair as the two men cleaned. She started snoring and Robert gently woke her and walked her out of the apartment after a rushed goodbye to Asad.

Asad closed the door behind them and turned around looking at his apartment. The balcony doors were still wide open and he heard the eternal crashing of the ocean distant over the murmur of traffic. He closed his eyes and time itself seemed to do the same.

But his cheek squinched. Through the darkness of his closed eyelids, that dreaded sound vibrated its way down his ear canal. He felt the small legs flicking against his skin. On the top of his bald, black head, he felt the flutter of fly wings. He swatted it away. 

“Ya thubabah jahimiyyah, sa’arsiluk ila al-jahim!” He said in Arabic. You infernal fly, I will send you to hell! And he chased the fly, the eater of his sweat, the destroyer of his comfort, the distraction of his flirtation. He went to his living room and grabbed the ancient sword and unsheathed it to swing at the fly, or at least to chase it out of the room and close the door.

But when he grabbed it, his eyes went fuzzy and what he saw before him was a city in complete smoke. He heard the crashing of waves and the singing of the muezzins in the background, a victory prayer as the city before him lay in ruin. Warriors with scimitars and spears ran across his visage as he watched a surrendering army place down their swords and speak in broken languages he could only partly understand. Greek and Latin. He looked up and the sword was raised in a glorious red victory, the sun hazing away as flies began to nibble at the drying wound-maker he raised above his head. He turned to see a woman on a shoreline, the waves crashing in the storm of the world, as her eyes like moonlight looked beseechingly at him, the wind pulling at her garments, her nakedness about to reveal itself. He heard her say one word, a whisper in the bulging loudness of his vision: “distruttore.”

Destroyer. He dropped the sword. 

It fell to his Palermo apartment floor, where the fly landed on it and rubbed its black little legs together. Asad was staggered; speechlessly certain that, with precise calculation, the fly was reforging the fate of the universe.