Emma Giglioli

Short Fiction

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When I met her it was a Saturday night and she was wearing next to nothing. Just a skirt that was too short and one of those sparkly tops made of sequins. Which was odd, because there were men dressed like penguins everywhere, some carrying trays of smoked salmon and foie gras, some carrying their wives by their elbows. These other women were of course way more proper than her, the amount of cleavage they were showing was just right, down to an art. She looked and felt like a disco ball. She stood out, but no one was complaining. When we met in the bathroom later, she was taking off her fire-red lipstick. Maybe I was staring a little. She noticed, so I told her I liked it. She said people were looking at her lips too much, they cared about them more than about what she had to say. I told her I wish I had ever had that problem, she told me to be careful what I wished for. I watched her talk to men and women all night from behind the counter, she ordered two martinis, both from me, both with three olives. At the end of the night, she was smoking near the staff exit, I saw the tip of her lit cigarette before I saw her. She asked me if I wanted to go dancing. I told her I wasn’t sure. She grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me into a cab. On the dancefloor, her top was sparkling just right in red neon lights. At one point she grabbed my face and told me I had pretty eyes, like the ones only little girls and owls had. Then she kissed me and told me I tasted just like an old friend of hers. I spent the night at her place, she showed me around and I loved all of it. The fact her door was maroon and her nipples were coral, the fact her kitchen table wobbled and her neck was ticklish, the fact she didn’t have a bedframe and her legs trembled easily. The next morning, we went out for brunch and she asked me if I knew how to make a mimosa. I told her I knew, of course, and she ordered a coffee. She told me her mama liked wine a little too much a while ago, so now they both drank just once a week. I told her my dad had a bar, but he lit it on fire for the insurance money. That made my mum drink a bit too much, too. I already was a bartender, so I just continued being one elsewhere. We ate our French toast and she told me she didn’t have a job, she was an activist, so she lit herself on fire for a living. She kidnapped koalas, chained herself to gates, climbed trees, and didn’t wash her hair for weeks. Sometimes she even brought herself to talk to pigs, like she did the night before. She knew them all, she said. Why they were there, their mistresses’ names, their favorite capital sin. Sometimes she got them to agree to a meeting, sometimes she just got stared at and called a doll. She told me it was all worth it because she was trying to keep the world from burning. Next Saturday I called in sick from work and went with her to another event, in what must have been a house but looked like a castle. She said hi to balding old men, slimy young guys, balding young guys, and slimy old men. We told them all we were sisters but the more we drank the more obvious it became that she was touching my ass and I was staring at her lips. They were fire-red again. If she asked me to burn the place down with her, I just might have done it. 

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Emma Giglioli is a university student and writer from a small, foggy, Italian town. Passionate about literature and foreign languages, she writes poetry and short fiction in both Italian and English.

Photo Credit: Max Cavitch is a photographer, writer, and teacher living in Philadelphia. His photographs have appeared in publications including Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, F-Stop Magazine, The Journal of Wild Culture, phoebe, and Politics/Letters, and exhibited most recently at the Blank Wall Gallery (Athens), the Chania International Photo Festival (Crete), Art Room Gallery, and the Biennale di Senigallia, Senigallia (Italy). Since 2019, he has been a contributing photographer for the public-science project, iNaturalist.