STEPHEN GIBSON
Noir Hair clumped on duct tape, skull in a trash bag, some cute logo on a child’s dirty pink T-shirt which I can’t remember, but seeing it as I ate pizza and drank beer in Rome at an outside table under an awning of some fast-food joint across from the Colosseum, one more tourist just trying to get away from all the other tourists— I couldn’t look away from the TV. The trash bag had been ripped open—bite marks on finger joints, the skull, and what was left of the dirty pink T-shirt. Some kind of animal. You can’t leave a body outside and not expect that to happen. All around, people ate and watched the same news program as I did, as I ate pizza and drank beer, surrounded in Rome by tourists just like myself who went looking for a table outside and ended up staring at a child’s remains in a trash bag. This was before the Florida case with that child’s T-shirt which also had some cute saying on it, some beach-joint kid’s T-shirt with sparkles and place names every joint sells from Clearwater to Fort Lauderdale. As people ate, I heard “monster” in Italian. The saying on the T-shirt was in Italian. So was the broadcast—and I was a tourist looking in, you might say, on dirty laundry. A trash bag isn’t “dirty laundry” with a child’s remains left outside— nonetheless, I was looking in as others looked outside themselves and didn’t like what they saw. That food joint in Rome was like a thousand others; a thousand trash bags were being stared at as I sat at that table, drank beer, ate pizza while across the street from me, hundreds of tourists were lined up to get into the Colosseum, wearing T-shirts
Raleigh Review | 41
