To Carlotta, I leave my memories

by Salena Casha

After her grandmother died, Carlotta was given the task of sorting through her uneaten food. Cans of Cannellini beans, expired onion power. The fridge was easy; everything out-of-date straight into the trash. For all her good intentions, the woman had kept things far past their expiration. A war thing that Carlotta couldn’t understand except in platitudes, but maybe her children would. 

She preferred this job to the others because it felt less like an invasion: rifling through drawers, emptying the closets, organizing wedding dishes and Disney world crystal and wine flutes into divisible piles: one for this cousin, another for this friend, another for the Salvation Army. Food was anonymous in a way that pressed linen and hand-crocheted tablecloths and patent leather shoes were not. 

Or so she thought until she opened the freezer. 

What she’d expected: pistachio ice cream with a single scoop removed, a chocolate chunk mired in a sea of mint. Frozen squid set in oblong rings like open mouths. Eggo waffles in yellow packaging for the mornings with her father when the two of them, mother and son, sat for coffee and spoke Italian. 

What she found: pounds of handmade pasta in Ziplock bags, hanging from the freezer door, stuck in the ice bin, slid into the bottom drawers meant for TV dinners. 

The air, turning solid in the cold, clung to the hair on her forearms as she stared into the mass. She thought about the woman, laid flat on the hospital bed they’d brought into her living room at the end, unable to lift her head from the polyester pillow. 

When had she made these? Even Carlotta knew that pasta took kneading, standing, full-bodied pressure. She’d done it once with her boyfriend as a date, and for three days after all the tiny muscles on her back, in her hands, sang. More importantly, she wondered after counting, what was she going to do with thirty bags of sketchy frozen pasta?

The one closest to her was filled with a striped, green tortellini. She shifted it, the bag clicking like seashells, to see the label. There was just a single word. 

Fico. 

A quick Google Translate turned it into fig. Fig pasta? Maybe her grandmother, for all her sharpness, had lost it in the end, and it had come out in the way she made her food. While her family would have cautioned about expired cheese, she was hungry and alone and it was lunchtime anyway, so she set a pot to boil, soaked them for two minutes, sprinkled the steaming batch with oliveoilsaltpepperbalsamic, and took a bite. 

Simple, classic, just-gummy ricotta, cut with the iron tang of ground spinach, melting on her tongue. She picked up the packaging and ran Google Translate again. Still fig. 

As she looked up from her phone, she froze. 

Gone was her grandmother’s tiled floor and marble countertops. A tree stood before her against the backdrop of a cerulean sky, roots cut into khaki soil. She watched, mesmerized, as a little girl with tanned skin skipped over to the tree. Looked left. Looked right. And then, began to climb. 

The girl did not notice Carlotta, a random woman at a mahogany kitchen table sitting with a mouthful of pasta in the open air like a Stanley Tucci food show. She was quick, barefoot, plucking first one and then another. 

Figs, Carlotta noticed. 

A battery of Italian, quick and sharp, came from behind, and Carlotta turned to see a man poking his head out from a window of a three-story house, the top of his hazel hair brushing a pair of underwear hanging from a laundry line. The girl froze, three figs in hand, one in her mouth. 

The girl swallowed hard before replying and then scuttled back down the tree, the figs tucked into the pocket of her skirt, her eyes cast down. Her mouth slowly, imperceptibly, chewing. Carlotta chewed with her in time, not noticing she had eaten the last bud until the scene faded. 

What in all holy hell, she thought, staring at her empty dish. 

She knew the stories from her grandmother, from the war: the fig trees, the farm. Hard to tell the age of the girl, maybe eight? The freezer stood behind her, closed, innocuous, and she gazed at it, dazed. She could not speak and instead filled the dishwasher and swiped a cloth across the counter. Clasped the freezer handle again. 

She catalogued the words on the remaining bags. There were names: Carlotta’s grandfather, her sister, both her parents. Her Aunt Alessandra. A woman’s name she didn’t recognize. She handled these with care, shuffling them to the door. The others were objects and random thoughts. Some general, like il mare. Another, a feeling that had no English equivalent: abbiocco. 

Once she completed the list, she sat back down at the table and studied the bags of pasta, a puzzle to reach back across time. She thought about her family, the manic energy buzzing above her as they cleaned and tallied and moved things around the space in all their lives. Would the memories be a welcome thing? Or something to haunt them, something to make them miss her more?

Carlotta decided, there in grandmother’s kitchen, to be scientific about it. She wouldn’t touch the named pastas, but she’d at least test the rest. While she told herself that she sampled one piece each day at midnight to not disturb the rest of her family’s mourning, perhaps, it was because she wanted the past to herself. That, in the dark, alone, it was easier to see the bursting sunrises, the unwrinkled skin, the way her grandmother swam out to dive below the waves off Capri as she ate. It gave her a fuller view of her life, but not necessarily what she was looking for: a cup of espresso drunk one last time together, tennis pocking in the background.

And so, she decided to make her own. 

At first, she wondered if the gift had skipped her, if her sister had received it instead and just didn’t know. But then again, her grandmother had taught her how to make it when she was a teenager after school. So now, in the midnight hours, she stuffed ravioli, pinched farfalle, rolled capellini, sliced pappardelle. Even got fancy with orecchiette, the little ears pressed with her thumb. At one point, she wondered if her grandmother had added a drop of LSD. Found a dealer and tripped for six hours after a batch of angel hair that made her wonder if she was an orange. But then, on a batch of gnocchi, it happened. 

She almost missed it because it was in the same apartment, just devoid of sprinkled pasta flour. Immaculate floors, moka pot shrill on the stove. Her grandmother moving, nightgown shushing around her to turn off the burner. She came back and offered sugar even though she knew Carlotta took it black. 

She stirred the coffee with a small, silver spoon and then looked up at her over her glasses. 

“Nadal is playing,” she said. 

Carlotta sat with her until the coffee went cold, eating the gnocchi slow.

“Let me tell you something,” her grandmother said, and Carlotta leaned forward. “La vita è una combinazione di magia e pasta.” She stood up and took her coffee cup to the sink. Shook out a cigarette and lit it above the stove. 

“I know you know this,” her grandmother said, and Carlotta moved to embrace her, but she was suddenly alone, empty bowl, and the taste of olive oil slicking her tongue.

Salena Casha's work has appeared in over 180 publications in the last decade. Her most recent work can be found on Flash the Court, Ghost Parachute, and Okay Donkey. February brought the publication of her science fiction novelette, A Way Back, with ELJ Editions. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com