Silently in the morning thou fliest upward

By Enrica M. Corradini

In an near future, humankind is waiting for the crash with the biggest asteroid ever hitting the Earth since the age of dinosaurs. So the most pressing problem for the eighteen year old Giorgio is a raging father and a weak mother who make his life a misery. The boy’s plan is thorough: to find a job, enabling him to be independent, letting him finish his education and go away from home. He can’t believe therefore that everything is running so smoothly when he is hired as dog sitter by the hospitable and peculiar Baldi family, two elderly ladies, Gina and Tina and her even older and weirder father. At the Baldi’s Giorgio will find the harmony he always lacked, he will learn the meaning of having a family and friends and he will experience funny and bizarre moments but also deep and meaningful for his personal growth. Unfortunately, the countdown remind the inescapable nearing of the asteroid. But will it really be a tragic end for humankind and Giorgio’s microcosm? Or will it be a brand new beginning?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Enrica M. Corradini
• Release date: Dec 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9788867554386

Book preview

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The following is a rough and quite partial reconstruction of the last months in wait for the biggest asteroid ever hitting the Earth since the age of dinosaurs.

On a normal day and without emphasizing it at all, government sources announced the collision between a meteorite and the planet. As usually happens on the release of such news, the majority of mankind dealt with it in the most obvious way: by taking no account of it.

The announcement was making thoughts hovering in the air, real, the same ones that once in a while, settle in the most unpredictable places as an old, dusty science fiction movie or a faded yellow Urania paperback book ended up among a chick lit collection. Possibly also a thought, like that summer night when you were running after a star dashing through the universe and were dreaming up how you could spend the money of a Super-lottery win as stratospheric as the meteorite itself.

Then, that thought too, like a paper streamer, together with a subtle unease, fell into the dustbin of the unutterable thoughts and there, it stayed.

However that may be, in one way or thousand others else, it is impossible you never thought about.

Most people’s imagination did not distance itself much from the idea of a fireball, aiming at Earth since ages at incredible speed. On a certain particular day, it would hit the Earth and give it a circular boost and the planet spinning round and round would have cast out human beings or what was left of them, to settle in other universes or to cruise for all eternity in the sidereal colds. When they decided to announce the official date of the impact too, after a few weeks from the release, the nearly three hundred atomic clocks, set at the time in strategic significant points of the earth’s crust, began a synchronic countdown in days, hours, minutes and seconds of time left.

After the first weeks of unavoidable bafflement, people digested the reports with a euphoric hope as if, in the end something new were right about to happen.

Some event would have broken up seemingly indissoluble bonds, got even with everybody, taken revenge for suffered abuses. The kind of situations a meteorite would have sorted out. Most of the human beings knew already that if the asteroid hit the planet, very little indeed would have left of the Earth. A boar tooth, maybe? A boar tooth or something of equal size could have certainly been the largest sized archaeological evidence of the old Earth.

In that period, as never before, the Star Trackers made such a roaring trade. After handing over, as per agreement, free information to officers of the Worldwide Multi-power Army, as hectic as lemurs on the alert against an ubiquitous enemy, they were selling at exorbitant prices the luminous tracks of the star movements in the Milky Way. Fortune tellers, showmen, communication experts and new prophets then translated them into public proclamations thus helping, in the relevant field, unleashing every kind of fears and exponentially increasing the stress levels. Not even on purpose, numberless quantities of meteorites had been falling in those years and, if getting used to them someone could consider them less dangerous, some others took this event as an ominous sign. Fortune tellers, by calling them Maids of Death belonged to the second group. Leaving out the usual wheeler dealers, the news the meteorite would stop the whole life process, in the end, began to nourish unexpected spiritual thoughts.

Still many were stubbornly thinking that whether the meteorite would drop good many miles far from their homes, this would not be a problem to them, and it became quite difficult for the Future Dealers explain that things would not properly go that way. Yet a certain amount of human beings went on living as usual, getting by and hoping that some event would have turned the situation around.

That morning, one of the many relentlessly counting the final term down, as foreseen the meteorite was travelling at stunning speed against his target planet. A steady sparrow footed rain was dabbing against Giorgio’s windowpanes who, after fantasizing about a strange phosphorescent beast haunting his dreams lately, half asleep, let his thoughts go caressing the hill shaped curves of his classmate. The meteorite would have spun them both, sticking them together, a human spindle beyond the magnetic boundaries of the Milky Way. He was not at all displeased by the image of himself lying in bed while the Earth underneath was cruising beyond the Pillars of Hercules of the Universe.

He rolled over, ready to resume his journey when a grunt disturbed him.

«Wake-up. Have you got it, it’s late? Move on, and go to bed earlier in the evening. Can you hear me? Move, it’s late!».

The voice had the same, urging concern of a man whose house is burning. Like an outburst of puke, it hit his auricles and reached his brain, making him firm in the final, this time, decision that by the end of the day he would answer to that ad waiting seemingly just for him for months.

After the nth sleepless night had been spent between catastrophic/purgative visions of the world and reveries of wild drowning into Dora’s body, it was a deep act of faith in life, with some rare exceptions, to push oneself finally out of bed and face another day. He knew that his father’s shouting would have reached the pain threshold when entering his room he would slam the door against the shelf edge, and plunked down that fluffy toy he always hated. His mother went on stubbornly setting it in that place, and his father would have trampled, slipping slightly on it and after cursing his god, he would have told him, as he has done every morning for almost eighteen years, to tidy up his toys in the evenings before going to sleep. It was obvious that, for him, time had stopped dead, forget those atomic clocks. Giorgio had just turned eighteen, and after an eighteen year training, he knew that every action his father performed, had mechanical consequences, involuntary and so recurring that one could time them down, as obvious as the fact that you needed wings to fly.

For all those years his mother never gave up putting the fluffy toy precariously on the shelf behind the door, his father never desisted entering, slamming it and the fluffy toy went on tumbling down. That morning too he entered slamming the door and the fluffy toy fell down. He stepped on it and slipped as usual. His yells wedged into Giorgio’s left eardrum, and he let a moan go.

«All right, I am».

«You are, my foot. You are still there! Mind what your father said». Here, the booming voice of his mother, out from the bottom of her stately rib cage, was full volume filling the whole space of the opened wide door. She was supporting her husband her way, as if he needed it.

«Ok but stop it». Now he was complaining in a slightly different way. He did not like himself at all. The interplanetary journey was over.

He sat up from the bed and pushed the pillow against his ears. His father pumped up to a higher volume, and when he finally got up lolling as soft as a ripe fig, his father shoved him a yank that sent him bumping out of balance against the wall edge. The fluffy toy did not turn a fake hair. He saw in the mirror on the opposite wall, a dark-red liquid trickling down from his left eyebrow. He felt no pain. In seeing the blood, the man shouted louder. Goodbye celestial bodies, silent driving forces of the infinite Space.

His father would only shut up when he was playing basketball. Giorgio cast sidelong glances at him sitting astonished, flat-faced and half open-mouthed. He seemed trapped up and set in a half-smile, silently waiting for his son to come out the locker room. They both went back home in dead silence. Sitting for dinner, after gobbling down few mouthfuls of pasta angrily, he began analysing the match in slow motion.

«Why that chap never passes you the ball? You must show what you are damned made of. Then, you had to go for the rim. What are you afraid of?...You have to tell him to stop assisting you like that. I say he can shove those assists up his fucking ass and you, you must train up every day, every single day in free throwing, have you got iiittt?», and so on, shouting the whole dinner long while Giorgio, speechless, was chewing on and on every single mouthful of that tasteless pasta that got stuck to the bottom of his tongue. Giorgio could stand the pain. He had a petrified core hidden under a seemingly understanding and compliant talking.

«Well, I got it, but now quit it, let’s eat, I can stand it no longer». He wondered why he always came out with that flabby voice he hated, and that conciliatory talk was like an agreed sign every time. In a split second, as in an already written play script, the sadistic educational marine drill sergeant flew off the handle. Invariably, hopped up by that call for reconcilement, he went screaming at three inches from his face: «You, worthless turd, don’t ever dare speak to me like that. You must respect me as I’m keeping you alive. I’m working my ass off to send you to school, your lordship. Do you get it? You fuck around the whole day, you klutz. I’m teaching you how to be streetwise, but you, you are a loser who will never pan out in life! Got it?" this one was a situation where he was praying for the asteroid to smash down.

Last time a spit of pesto sauce spurted from that mouth and landed on his left eyelid. He cleaned it up carelessly. He unfailingly felt like laughing for the domino effect situations when his father got angry and set his hate free. When he was shouting, his mother was silent, and when he calmed down, it was her turn to shout, thus exchanging, both had the time to recover. Should her mother be angry at him, his father was hard on her heels. He really looked forward to doing it, and any excuse would do. Hereupon his mother would tell him: «Stop it, now" in a firm, a little pleading voice. This was enough for restraining him by crediting him with power.

When his father was short of words, almost all the times, would try to beat him and while the lad was running away through the house screaming: «Enough, pack it in» he was even more excited, and not only did not stop but he would shout louder while their wild stomping boomed through the whole block.

Since they had their babies, these were the games the Paganellas played. Their yelling and sullen stomping did not apparently affect the mass of packed humankind holing up in the adjoining flats. Usually people turned nasty if on sunny days, just a few of a too abundant watering had dropped from above or if a hydrangea crumpled leaf, after surfing the air, fainted down among the cyclamens downstairs. In the condominium meetings, they would assert with unexpected emphasis their rights not to tolerate other people’s negligence but they would never dare to call up the Public Safety for the disturbance. Had they actually done it, once the report was found true, the Paganellas would be deported to a Rehabilitation Centre for Aggressive Parents, from which usually, one never comes back. Anyway, this was not the reason that kept the neighbours from reporting them. First of all, people feared such aggressiveness could turn against them, and then it was a common point of view that if the two had not killed each other yet, probably they would have never done it. In case, the crime correspondents were the real problem who, trading on the white roses of Serenity block, punch-drunk for the fertilizer would have pled for a tear or a still unpublished detail. So they could have spat into a microphone that the Paganellas were a normal family and then drifting away like real movie stars. A truly unpleasant event. To say more, in that