the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) Read Free

deadweight. Then her father would say make an angel, and Alice would move her arms up and down. When she got up and looked at her outline sculpted in the white, it really did look like the shadow of an angel with outspread wings.
    Alice made a snow angel, just like that, for no reason, just to prove to herself that she was still alive. She managed to turn her head to one side and start breathing again, even though it felt as if the air wasn't going where it was supposed to. She had the strange sensation of not knowing which way her legs were turned. The very strange sensation of no longer having legs at all.
    She tried to get up, but she couldn't.
    If it weren't for the fog, someone might have seen her from above, a green stain splayed at the bottom of a gully, a few steps from the spot where a little waterfall would start flowing again in the spring, where, with the first warmth, wild strawberries would grow, and if you waited long enough they'd ripen, as sweet as candy, and you could pick a basketful in a day. Alice cried for help, but her thin voice was swallowed up by the fog. She tried to get up again, or at least to turn over, but it was no use.
    Her father had told her that people who freeze to death feel very hot and, just before dying, have an urge to get undressed. Almost everyone who dies of cold is found in their underwear. And hers were dirty.
    She was starting to lose feeling in her fingers as well. She took off her glove, blew into it, and then put it back on her clenched fist, to warm it up. She did the same with her other hand. She repeated this ludicrous gesture two or three times.
    It's your extremities that get you, her father always said. Your toes and fingers, your nose and ears. Your heart does everything in its power to keep the blood to itself, leaving the rest to freeze.
    Alice imagined her fingers turning blue and then, slowly, her arms and her legs. She thought about her heart pumping harder and harder, trying to keep in all the remaining warmth. She would go so stiff that if a wolf passed by it would snap off one of her arms just by stepping on it.
    They must be looking for me.
    I wonder if there really are any wolves around here.
    I can't feel my fingers anymore.
    If only I hadn't drunk that milk.
    Bo-dy weight for-ward.
    Of course not, wolves would be hibernating now.
    Eric will be furious.
    I don't want to race.
    Don't be stupid, you know very well that wolves don't hibernate.
    Her thoughts were growing more and more circular and illogical.
    The sun sank slowly behind Mount Chaberton as if nothing was the matter. The shadow of the mountains spread over Alice and the fog turned completely black.

THE ARCHIMEDES PRINCIPLE
    1984

2
    When the twins were small and Michela was up to one of her tricks, like throwing herself downstairs in her baby walker or sticking a pea up one of her nostrils, so that she had to be taken to the emergency room to have it removed with special tweezers, their father would always say to Mattia, the firstborn, that his mother's womb was too small for both of them.
    "God only knows what the two of you got up to in there," he said. "I reckon all those kicks you gave your sister did her some serious damage."
    Then he laughed, even though it was no laughing matter. He lifted Michela in the air and buried his beard in her soft cheeks.
    Mattia would watch from below. He would laugh too, letting his father's words filter through him by osmosis, without really understanding them. He let them settle at the bottom of his stomach, forming a thick, sticky layer, like the sediment of wine that has aged for a long time.
    His father's laughter turned into a strained smile when, at two and a half, Michela still couldn't utter a single word. Not even mommy or poo-poo or sleepy or woof. Her inarticulate little cries rose from such a solitary, deserted place that they made their father shiver every time.
    When she was five and a half a speech therapist with thick glasses sat Michela down in