"The Water Goddess" by Bridget Rohde
We stand in our small, dank room, crowded with chintz-covered, overstuffed furniture and a still-made, one-and-a-half size bed, in the cheapest, walk-up pensione he could have possibly found in the otherwise most romantic city in the world, and I do what has suddenly occurred to me with the bracing clarity of an Arctic sunrise, I break up with him, even though I could have done it any one of a million times over the last five years at the sprawling but sterile apartment deeded him by an occasionally incarcerated client and walked home the three city blocks, not even avenues, to my place, but here, over 4,148 miles away on what feels like the edge of the world, I am like a water goddess rising from the lagoon and striking down a once feared and exalted dragon until he lies writhing in the sinking silt wearing nothing but a disbelieving smile and tighty-whities, because this room is at least as hot as one of the lower circles of hell, and I tell him that he has managed to suck Venice bone-dry of joy, and no, I don’t want my compromised joy back with what ifs and caveats, and I leave, rolling my suitcase down the rickety stairs with its switch-back landings, but never turning back, then through the labyrinth of preternaturally dark alleys, without making even one wrong turn, to the footbridge named for shoeless monks over the Grand Canal that is far from grand to the railway station overseen by a blind virgin, and buy a train ticket to Rome because it is the Eternal City, goodness and light and everything that is the opposite of this god-forsaken place that raises the stakes for being romantic to tortuous, unscalable heights, and I will have options there, in Rome, which I need because I have no idea what I am going to do next. But, as the train climbs up startlingly forested hills then rolls down to golden fields interrupted by those small Italian towns that smell like burning rubber, a plan starts to form from a seed that has likely been germinating for longer than I care to admit that involves me taking a commuter flight to Palermo and a taxi to a resort where the detective from my Italian class, who I imagine wears boxers, said he would be vacationing; he said you could tumble off the side of an underwater cliff-face deep into the crystalline sea there.
When I land in Palermo, I have received a text from my ex, to which I don’t respond, and I text the detective, who doesn’t immediately respond to me, but I know the name of the resort where he is staying so I ask a taxi driver to take me there. When I arrive, it is dusk, and I walk around to the back of the building where it fans out before the Mediterranean, taking in terraces scattered haphazardly across the cliff, wild red poppies appearing to hold back the sea and the deepening sky rippled like a velour blanket. I spot the detective on the lowest terrace, in conversation with his wife or a girlfriend, and, when he sees me looking, I wave then head to a bar perched on the upper most terrace where I order a Spritz and go through my wallet making a pile of things to discard, pictures of my ex on the beach and in the countryside, receipts for hotels where we had stayed and business cards for restaurants we had enjoyed, as well as a Police Benevolent Association card the detective had given me in case I ever got stopped for speeding, and I hand this detritus to the bartender and ask him in my beginner’s Italian to discard it, but he doesn’t understand, and we pantomime until he asks “Fini?” and I say “Fini!” as I elaborately brush my hands together.
Bridget Rohde is a lawyer who has worked as a federal prosecutor, including Acting U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, and as a criminal defense attorney. Her legal writing has appeared in The New York Law Journal and Law360, among other publications. Currently, she is focused on writing fiction. Her first published short story, Soundtrack, appeared in The Loch Raven Review in November 2021.
