IT WAS 6:42 A.M., and I was sitting in the dark, waiting for the first fragment of dawn to put an end to that interminable night. When the first mustardy glow bounced off the neighbour’s window and rolled into the kitchen, it lifted from nothingness a pile of dirty dishes and reminded me of the things I wouldn’t have the energy to do. So I closed the door and shuffled to the bathroom to find my clothes, bunched by the tub. I slid on yesterday’s socks and shimmied into corduroy pants as I reached for the Tylenol. The bathroom vanity really needed changing, but it wasn’t worth it, with us leaving in a few months. Why did we bother buying a place for just two years? I hated that apartment, with its dusty nooks, and I should have hated that city, with its blink-and-they-are-gone summers, its polar winters, and its doggedness to drag me down. In twelve months here, my marriage had crumbled, my mother had died, and my freelancing career had dried up. Somehow I didn’t hold it against Montreal, though. If I had to implode somewhere, it might as well be in Quebec.
My cell vibrated. Carl would be here in ten minutes. Last night he texted, offering to pick up Matt on his way to work at a ridiculous 7:15. Still, it was better than having to get behind the wheel after a sleepless night, so I dashed to Matt’s room, at the tail end of that snake-like
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Elena Molinari is an Italian-born award-winning journalist, writer and mother. She started her career at Reuters in New York and later became a foreign correspondent for the Italian newspaper Avvenire. Her first published book in Italian, Potere Rosa, deals with the compromises women make to gain social influence, while the second one, Ragionevole Dubbio, revolves around unfair incarceration in the U.S. After traveling extensively in Central America, she wrote Morte in Paradiso, a novel exploring the paradoxes of expat life, which appeared in 2017. In 2022, she started writing fiction in English. She’s working on two novels.