PRESS RELEASE

“Life emerged from the sea, and after a time, it found its way back to it,” thought Doctor Orfeo as he poured himself a cup of coffee from a small aluminumpot. There he sat at a café overlooking the lower reaches of Santa Ninfa, each building drained of joyas much as the next. He watched as his little golden spoon dove into the crests of white crema that swirled over the surface of his dark coffee, and set the spoon aside to take a sip.

It had already been a year since he last saw his counterpart from the deep ocean, Doctor Ione, having promised each other they would focus on their respective work. He could almost see the errant strands of seaweed woven into her hair. Her skin was the color of rich dark sand, the depths of which could containan entire universe of life and the fossils of waves yetto come.

Not long after he received a note from Don Benedetto’s servant on that day, saying farewell to his guardian cloves of spectral garlic hung just inside the entryway to his room, he left Santa Ninfa’s spider web of narrow streets, snaking his way to the villa set upon the bluff overlooking the city, passing by no shortage of ossified birds, lizards, and perhaps the outstretched effigies of people that were melded to the walls of the tufa that formed the Don’s Citadel, after centuries of volcanic eruptions peppered its ancient gates with their still forms.

The Doctor was led into Don Benedetto’s grounds by a sleepless henchwoman with a long braid that would whip to and fro like a metronome with every step, a detail which Doctor Orfeo did not miss, leaving him with a surprised smile as he tried to turn his attentions to the square-planed formal gardens leading up to the front double doors of the seashell white villa.

Inside, thick tapestries suffused the walls of all light, and mustard and walnut colored floor tiles echoed back each step as they made their way up a grand staircase into the Don’s chamber.

The Don himself was small, suffused with a crackling crimson mist, his features sallow and half hidden by pleated indigo sheets. A forking mustache told the time in shadows upon the sides of his mouth, and his brows was creased with perspiration, which the Doctor noted as a side effect of anxiety more than a symptom of illness.

The Doctor, drawing out a small vacuum tube from his black and silver bag, began by asking the Don, “ How do you do, Don Benedetto. I already know why you summoned me. I see your condition and know what to do to treat it. I just wrote a paper on it, in fact.”

The Don grunted in reply, “I am not given to grand statements here. Name your price, and it’s yours. Just help me. No one else can.”

Doctor Orfeo paused, looking at the Don square in the eye as the Don’s henchperson stood in the back, wringing her hands about a jointed lead pipe. “Money is one thing, but there’s a mine that you own outside the city, Don Benedetto. I have seen to it that many of the miners are becoming immaterial - their

essence is no longer of this time, or the next. They have given their past to you, and they have no future to speak of. I think the profit of that mine has declined to the point that it’s what we can call, ‘a well that has run dry.’ Give that mine to them, and let them pay you dividends. You’ll see what they make of it in turn.”

The Don’s eyes nearly bugged out. “My mine? You’re fucking nuts, with all due respect, Doctor Orfeo.”

The doctor popped a small woven cord into the tail end of the glass vacuum tube. His eyes turned calmly back to the Don. “Yes or no, Don Benedetto? I can help you here and now, or you can seek out the help of Doctor Mesmerato from the bottom of the barrel.”

Don Benedetto groaned, “You are a wicked man, Doctor Orfeo, and I will never forget the vice you shoved my head into today. My memory is longer than the pain I’m feeling each time I breathe in this prickly smoke! They have the mine. As soon as I say it, mark my word, it’s done!”

At that, Doctor Orfeo held the vacuum tube up to the troublesome mist, and withdrew a small square black box, depressing a red button. The vacuum tube began to glow with a blue, then red, then yellow light and then, with a loud bang, it suddenly opened by way of a tiny glass hinge at the top of the bulb, sucking up the miasma with a crackling scream, dragging it out of the air and the Don’s very nasal passages. Once the bulb filled up with gas, the little glass hinge sucked itself closed. With that, the Don’s pallor came back and he sat upright in bed as though nothing at all had ever happened.

The Doctor exhaled, “You should be fine now, Don Benedetto. If you’ll excuse me, I have to make my way back to my own affairs. I’ll let you send a message to the mine.”

With that, Doctor Orfeo packed up his things and left both the Don and the Don’s henchperson in the room, where he was led out by a man with a rather crooked nose, the Doctor’s right ear trailing blood.

Now, long after the fact, all that the Doctor had to show for it was this miserable table on a humid day, and the shadow of a sudden visitor before him- a paid messenger with a tiny head wearing the featured Augury wings of the famed Fleet Foot Delivery Service, who extended a telegram his way and fished out payment from the money Doctor Orfeo had set aside to pay the cafe bill.

Doctor Orfeo gave the messenger the stink eye, and opening the telegram, was confronted with a statement written in a hand he knew well: “BE MY DEMITASSE.”

by Anthony Giordano