[pirate witch]: 524.Novels.NaNoWriMo 2007 chapter 3

It was a sunny day, and at seven in the morning Livia walked outside. She was dressed in sweat pants, a large woolen sweater, sneakers, and a scarf wound over her mouth and nose. The previous night, after talking to her father on the phone, she had decided to go running in the mornings until the first snow. 

She ran by apartment buildings, grocery stores, lawyer’s offices in buildings with peeling paint and crumbling bricks. Livia ran, and as she ran, she saw people that she had known once, a long time ago, and the parents of kids that she had gone to school with. Their children were in college now, sending letters from Oregon and California, and London and Paris. Livia didn’t need to send letters, she realized as she ran past the theater where her performance had been the night before. She had never moved in her life, never changed ballet companies, never traveled outside of the country. When her mother was alive, she had suggested that the family go to Italy, her father’s mother country. Anthony and his wife had been right before she got pregnant with Livia, but after she died the two remaining DiMarias never did return.

Livia stopped running suddenly, her feet feeling strange in the sneakers that she wore. They throbbed and blistered, which wasn’t new, but still wasn’t fun. Inside the grimy window of the second hand book shop that Livia had stopped outside of was Katrina the fortune teller. She was climbing a ladder, one of those fantastic ladders that slid along bookshelves. It looked like she was having trouble though, partially because she was wearing odd little boots with high heels under her multi layered, but also because she appeared completely inebriated. 

“Are you going to go in?” an old man with a tweed overcoat and a fedora on his head asked Livia. She was standing in the door way and he didn’t look pleased. 

“Oh, no,” Livia said and turned away from the store. She really did not want to speak to Katrina at that point in time. 

The man walked up to the door and pulled an ancient looking set of keys from his pocket and inserted one of them into the lock on the door. Livia watched in disbelief as he turned two other locks and opened the door. She hurried up to the window again and cupped her hands to the glass. With her forehead resting on her fingers, she peered into the dark interior of the shop. This time, all she saw were books and boxes. The ladder was empty. There was however, a door in the back of the store. Katrina must have gone out that door, she decided, and continued running.

Downtown, there was a group of middle aged business doing tai chi around the frost covered fountain. Green brass cupids played trumpets and harps around an angel who held a large urn out in her cracked, moss colored arms. The water that rained down from inside the urn was copper colored, and there were hundreds of pennies and nickels carpeting the bottom of the basin. A sign near the fountain claimed that all proceeds would go to benefit a research fund for cancer, but Livia could never remember anyone taking the coins out of it. 

She sat down on the rim of the fountain and caught her breath. It hadn’t seemed like a very long run, but when Livia looked up to the church tower that looked over the entire city, she saw that it was nearly nine o’clock. More people were walking around now, shopkeepers setting up and mothers walking their children to school. 

Livia shut her eyes as they walked around her. Carts rattled and children whined. Windows slid open and let the smell of baking bread into the air. Someone spoke in a different language near Livia, but she didn’t open her eyes. It wasn’t until she felt a sharp jab on her shoulder that her eyes opened to the smiling face of a little girl with curly red hair.

“Hello,” Livia said. She smiled back at the girl, and then waved at her mother, who was making strides over to her daughter looking stern, to show that she wasn’t angry.

“I like your scarf,” the girl said, and played with the tassels with pudgy fingers. “It’s shiny.”

“Thanks,” Livia replied and unwound it from her neck to show the girl. “It’s actually my Daddy’s, but I’m using it today because it’s so cold out.”

When the child was led away by her mother, still smiling and waving, Livia took a closer look at her scarf and gasped out loud. She hadn’t understood what the girl had meant by saying that the scarf was shiny, supposing that the girl just meant that it was nice. Seeing it in the full sunlight, though, she could see the scarf glittering and reflecting the light in a way that she was sure it wasn’t designed to do. After all, it was her father’s scarf, and he wasn’t exactly a glittery guy.

It was gold dust. All over the scarf the powder clung to fibers of the fabric as though it had been there since the scarf was made. Livia couldn’t remember the last time she saw the scarf, she had dug it out of the closet that very morning, looking for something of her father’s to make her feel better. How long had this dust been there? How long had her father had it in the house?


Coats, hats, mittens, boots, backpacks, everything that was in the closet was now in a pile on the kitchen floor. Livia had folded up the card table and put it beside the refrigerator in order to create enough room for her search. She was in a frenzy, tearing through everything, holding her breath, and crying over the amount of almost liquid gold powder was clinging to her father’s clothes, her boots, her mother’s old tablecloths. 

The phone didn’t ring for nearly three hours as Livia made piles of things that were contaminated and things that were not. How could it? It had been disconnected the moment Livia walked through the door. She couldn’t let anyone call. Not the police, not her father, not anyone. 

When Livia got tired of running outside every time she wanted to breathe, she went to her next door neighbors’ house and knocked on the door. They were doctors at a children’s hospital and had some medical supplies they could sometimes give away. To Livia’s luck, they happened to have a surgical mask that they didn’t need, and she covered her mouth and nose with it, the same way she had covered them this morning with the drugged out scarf. 

Now, feeling somewhat like a character on CSI, Livia sat on her kitchen floor, surrounded by an illegal drug, with a mask and gloves, and tried to sort everything out.