Stella Mia Read Free Page B

star.”
    With my lantern in hand, I walk along the pebbly beach near my family’s home in Terme Vigliatore, Messina, singing a silly song I made up the other night as I stared at all the stars in the beautiful Sicilian sky. Every time I sing the song, I change the colors of the stars. My four-year-old sister, Carlotta, loves the song, and as soon as night falls, she takes my hand and pulls me outside so she can look at the stars and decide which colors she’s going to choose.
    I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember. Mama told me I began to sing shortly after she began taking me to Mass when I was three years old. She said I immediately fell in love with the hymns and would try to hum along. To encourage my singing, she would play the radio for me, but only when Papá, my father, was not home. For one time he caught Mama and me singing together, and he yelled at us. From that moment on, I always knew never to sing in front of Papá. Of course, my younger siblings love to hear me sing. In addition to Carlotta, there are two boys—Enzo, who is six years old, and Pietro, who is just two. I share a bedroom with my brothers and sister, and I often sing to them softly at night so that Papá cannot hear me.
    Only the stars and the ocean’s roaring waves are my companions tonight. It is a little past midnight, and I am the sole person crazy enough to be out alone this late. But I’m not afraid. As I make my way barefoot along the shoreline, holding my ciabattas in hand, I squint, trying to make out the shadow of Vulcano, one of the Aeolian Islands, on the other side of the ocean. Since it is a clear night with a full moon overhead, I am able to discern the island’s ominous shadow.
    This is the only time that I have to myself. From the moment I wake up to shortly before I go to bed, my days are filled, helping my mother care for my siblings.
    Though I am sixteen years old, my body often aches like that of a sixty-year-old woman. I started doing heavy chores when I was seven years old. Working hard and rearing my sister and brothers is the only life I know. The sole comfort I have is in my singing and attending church on Sundays.
    My mother and I share few moments of laughter. For like me, she is burdened with the crushing load of running a household and tending to her children, not to mention keeping at bay my father’s fury. My poor mother started receiving beatings at my father’s hands not long after she married him at the tender age of fourteen. She had me when she was fifteen. Though she is now thirty-two, she looks closer to fifty. My father is a decade older than my mother. I’ve witnessed his hitting my mother for as long as I can remember.
    Though I’ve become accustomed to my father’s abuse, I still wonder why he is so cruel toward my mother and me. I received my fair share of lashings when I was a child, but the older I got the more intense his abuse became. I remember the first time he hit me. I was only eight. He came home from work and found me outside playing in our garden. I loved the flowers, plants, and herbs my mother had planted. She had begun teaching me how to garden and pick the herbs for both our cooking and to make healing ointments. I took it upon myself that day to help my mother by picking a few herbs. But when my father found me, he yelled at me for cutting too many herbs. I tried explaining to him, but that only angered him more, and he smacked me so hard that I fell to the ground. I was shocked, but I believed I deserved his punishment because I had done something wrong by picking too many herbs. Mama had come out in time to witness Papá hit me, and she yelled at him, but then he slapped her across the face, too. My mother soon learned not to intervene when he hit me because she would always get hit and often much worse than just a slap. Mama does whatever she can to ensure my father remains calm so he will leave me alone. But her