Sarah

“I stood as if listening to music, and in something like the way we are told suns are born, that specks of matter in nearly empty space begin to fall, rushing across vast distances toward a hot sphere of turbulence and unimaginable density, in such a way my body, which only a moment ago as I’d watched the cat might best have been described as a vapor, a dimly perceived cloud around my soul, began to coalesce.”
― Frank Conroy, Stop-Time: A Memoir

“I could not resist the clarity of the world in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn’t made up my mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.”
― Frank Conroy, Stop-Time: A Memoir

“Signora Fiore makes the cloth people, but they belong to the community. To everyone.”

Izzy was trying to formulate a polite way of asking Signora Fiore why she made the cloth people when the woman supplied the answer. “She says this town is known as a ‘village at the edge.’l Izzy studied Signora Fire’s crosshatched face as she translated her words. “There are many of these villages around Italy. First the young people moved to the cities. They left the elderly -‘the ancients,’ they call them - behind. Then the ancients died.” Signora Fiore was shaking her head as she surveyed the empty square. “Then the pandemic came and even more of the older people died. This village used to have five hundred people. Now there are forty-five.”
― Katie Hafner, The Boys

“When people started dying in the village, the emptiness gave her a huge canvas to work with. She has always liked to sew. So last year, she started sewing the cloth people. She’s made more than a hundred of them. They are real people. People who died.”

The bells of the church rang, and a solitary woman in a black shawl left the church and crossed the piazza. Signora Fiore was still talking. “The people who died are ‘gli spariti.’” Izzy stopped, unsure how to translate this. “‘Gli spariti,’ they’re called,” she said. “The vanished.”

“The vanished?” Ethan asked. Izzy nodded. Signora Fiore was still talking. “Some of the cloth people aren’t people who died. Like Signora Fiore’s own children. They live in Milan. Her daughter is a doctor. Her son owns a furniture store. She has sewn them because she doesn’t know when she’ll see them again.”
― Katie Hafner, The Boys