Suspended Crossing
Giulia has been making boats for thirty-two years. Small ones. Six to eight inches. Started the day after her husband's funeral. Didn't plan to keep going. Just made one. Then another. Now she has two hundred and forty-seven hanging from her workshop ceiling on fishing line, spinning slowly in the air from the window fan.
She's sixty-four. Lives in Lampedusa. The workshop used to be Antonio's—he built actual boats, fishing vessels, before he drowned. She kept his tools but makes toys now. That's what people call them. Toys.
She doesn't correct them.
This morning she's working on a new one. Hull painted coral pink. Lace she bought at the market for sails. A tiny succulent wired to the deck—real plant, real soil in a bottle cap, roots somehow holding in maybe a thimbleful of dirt. It's her third try. First two fell off.
Her granddaughter Bianca comes by before school. Sixteen. Backpack. Headphones. Stops in the doorway.
"Still making these?"
"Yeah."
"How many now?"
"Don't count anymore."
Bianca walks through the suspended boats. They brush her hair. She used to love that when she was small. Now she just pushes them aside.
"Mom says you should sell them."
"People buy them sometimes."
"I mean like, to a gallery. Marco's mom knows someone in Palermo."
Marco is the boyfriend. Works coast guard. Sees things. Giulia knows what he sees because everyone here knows what everyone sees even when nobody talks about it.
"Tell your mom I'm not interested."
"She says you could make actual money."
"I make money."
"Like, real money."
Giulia dips her brush in yellow paint. The exact yellow of egg yolk. Paints a stripe along the hull. "This is real money."
Bianca leaves for school. The boats keep spinning.
Giulia works. Adds the yellow stripe. Then a green one. Colors she makes up. Not country colors. Not signal colors. Just colors that feel right. She doesn't know why coral pink and yellow and green. Just does.
The succulent is still holding. Small miracle. She wired it tight enough but not too tight. The plant is maybe two inches tall. Will grow or won't. Probably won't. But for now it's there, green and alive, growing from the deck of a coral pink boat that will never touch water.
She hangs it with the others. It spins. Joins the flotilla. Two hundred and forty-eight boats now. All suspended mid-voyage. All going nowhere.
Her friend Teresa stops by around lunch. Brings bread. They eat in the workshop, sitting on Antonio's old workbench, surrounded by boats.
"Museum called again," Teresa says.
"I know."
"You should sell them. What are you keeping them for?"
Giulia chews bread. Doesn't answer.
Teresa knows about Antonio. Everyone knows. Fishing accident thirty-two years ago. Storm. Four boats went out. Three came back. His didn't.
What Teresa doesn't know—what nobody knows—is that Giulia started making the boats because she needed to see one make it across. Just one. Even a toy one. Even a six-inch one that never touches water. Just needed to see one complete a crossing.
None of them have. They all hang there, suspended. But she keeps making them anyway.
"Your rent," Teresa says.
"What about it?"
"The museum money would help."
"I'm fine."
Teresa doesn't push. They finish the bread. She leaves.
Giulia starts another boat. Blue hull this time. The blue of deep water. The blue Antonio's boat probably ended up in. She paints carefully. Takes hours. Gets the color exactly right.
Then adds a plant. Another succulent. Wires it to the deck. Tests it. Holds.
Two hundred and forty-nine boats.
Her daughter Carmela calls in the evening. From Rome. Checking in. They talk about Bianca, about school, about Carmela's job, about nothing important.
"Bianca says you're still making boats."
"Yeah."
"How many now?"
"A lot."
"Mom, you need to sell them. They're taking over your life."
"They're not taking over anything. They're just boats."
Silence on the line. Carmela doesn't understand. Giulia doesn't explain.
They hang up.
Giulia sits under the boats. Looks up. All of them spinning slowly. All different colors. All with their tiny flags—scraps of fabric, bits of paper, anything that can fly from a toothpick mast. All with their impossible gardens—plants that somehow root in bottle caps, in thimbles, in spaces too small to sustain life but sustaining it anyway.
She thinks about the cemetery up the hill. The one with markers for people whose names nobody knows. The ones the sea brings. The ones who tried crossing. The ones whose boats didn't make it.
She goes there sometimes. Brings flowers she grows herself. Puts them on the markers. Doesn't pray. Doesn't know how to pray for people she never met. Just stands there.
The boats washing up on the beaches aren't toys. They're deflated rafts. Life jackets. Fragments of wood. Pieces of vessels that carried people who had to leave places that were killing them to risk water that might kill them faster.
Giulia knows this. Everyone here knows this. The news doesn't call them incidents anymore. Doesn't know what to call them. Just shows the numbers. The bodies. The empty boats.
She makes hers pretty. Makes them coral pink and yellow and green. Makes them small enough to hold. Makes them beautiful enough that people call them toys and buy them for their children and hang them in nurseries as mobiles.
Makes them beautiful so she can look at them without dying.
Makes them beautiful so other people will look at them and not think about what they really are.
She starts another one. Red hull. The red of emergency. The red of blood. The red of stop, danger, warning, too late.
Paints it carefully. Takes all evening.
Adds white sails made from old bedsheet. Antonio's bedsheet. The one from their wedding. She's been cutting pieces from it for years. It's almost gone now.
Adds a plant. Succulent. Green.
Hangs it.
Two hundred and fifty boats.
All suspended. All mid-crossing. All beautiful. All terrible.
She sits under them until dark. Then goes inside. Makes dinner. Eats alone. Watches TV without watching.
Goes to bed under the ceiling of boats visible through the workshop window. They spin in the dark. She can see their shadows on the wall. Two hundred and fifty boats crossing nothing, arriving nowhere, suspended forever in the space between leaving and reaching.
In the morning she makes another one.
Has been making them for thirty-two years.
Will probably make them for thirty-two more.
Doesn't know what else to do with her hands.
Doesn't know what else to do with the knowing.
