Anastasia Vassos
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Epistle: Eight Years After

I am cutting olives for my lunch. It’s a rainy afternoon. I stand at the kitchen counter slicing the fleshy tissue away from the pit of each one. Nothing satisfies me like olives when I am hungry. The way the salt of them fills my still inside and brings on more appetite. The skin resists the pinch of my knife, but once pierced, the olive offers its brown speckled flesh to my hand.

You are so real at this moment, you are standing over my shoulder. I recall our penultimate moment, though I didn’t know it at the time. The day I left Thessaloniki for Santorini, you handed me a plastic bucket of olives to fortify me on the trip. Later, I spent afternoons on the island sitting on a metal chair on the edge of the caldera, staring out at the volcano, drinking beer and eating those olives, one by one.

last night's thunder—
somewhere
a man has died