White Vespa by Kevin Oderman

about Anne. He
didn’t think she was here to make his life on Sými better. She hadn’t made his life on Bainbridge better, that was sure. His mother. Her face pasty with anger. Red-faced anger was for people with blood in their veins. And Anne was always telling tales. Sometimes they were true, but why tell them? And they weren’t always true. Anne’d had a way of getting even, by getting Paul switched.
    One time she’d called their mother to his door in the middle of the night by acting scared, Something’s wrong with Paul, come quick , when the thing that was wrong with him was that he was frustrated. Their mother had sent Anne back to bed but marched Paul into the kitchen, where, when he denied what he’d been doing, she’d slashed at his ass with a thin, metal spatula. For lying. What had she expected him to say? But their parents were crazy on the subject of lying. And his mother wasn’t the kind to delegate a paddling to their father. Paul still remembered the white flashes of pain, and his mother’s spiteful determination to make it hurt. Anne, he thought, had no doubt heard his screaming.

Twenty-eight
    25 June
    Â 
    â€œGuidebook says it was abandoned in the 1950s.”
    â€œJust like that, agreed and left?” Myles asked.
    They had stopped in the shade on the road up to Mikró Horió. Myles was setting up for a long shot. The town was across from them, impressive and empty. One building, plastered and whitewashed and trimmed out in green, had been restored as a taverna or ouzerí and recalled what the town must have been. Another small building above it was under renovation and the church had been maintained, but except for that the town was coming down, slowly turning to rubble. Nothing moved.
    â€œStill life,” Jim observed wryly, when he heard the shutter click.
    â€œPeople are always leaving,” Myles said somberly. “But we don’t remark their absence. They get replaced. The bustle distracts us.”
    Myles fell silent, thinking about Max. He twisted off the long lens and snapped the wide angle into place.
    â€œAnd?” Jim asked.
    â€œAnd we know it anyway and want it acknowledged,” Myles said. “So we like places like this, beautiful abandoned places. Doesn’t have to be our abandoned place to stand for the lost homeland or just the lost home.”
    â€œ Nóstos. Nostalgia.”
    â€œOld photographs get us to the same place.” Myles glanced at Jim, nodding. “The world in the photograph is always a lost world. The place might be the same but the people are always gone or changed. Doesn’t have to be a very old photograph if the people in it are people we knew. But if it is an old photograph, a very old photograph, it doesn’t matter who the people are, because we know they’re all dead.”
    They walked on up the dirt track, talking. The ghost town, which had looked small on the hillside, seemed to get bigger as they walked into it. By the time they got to the swept terrace of the padlocked white taverna, what had
been Mikró Horió was all around them. A few of the alleys were clear but most were deep in rubble, in plaster and stone that had fallen from the walls. As they walked they occasionally heard a clatter; the town was not uninhabited, after all, but home to a herd of ravening goats, there to help the elements in bringing the place down.
    Myles worked. A fig tree growing straight from the heart of a small cottage. The open mouths of terrace ovens. Along one arcing alley he shot a whole row of ovens, one over the shoulder of the next, a long, curving tribute to bread making.
    Some of the houses still had roofs, or a part of a roof, and the interiors swam in blue, dust-laden light. There were carved cupboards and divans, hearths over free-form fireplaces, and small niches carved from the walls. Some of these places had once looked a great deal like Myles’ house on