Family Tree

Short Story by Kristin Melia

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Angelo proudly handed me a Christmas ornament. A moose in an outhouse. It was the first week of December, and as I sat in a Roman apartment, I smiled in spite of myself.

"We got it in Maine," Angelo told me.

Staying with a friend's parents, I was in Rome on a last-minute business trip. As Angelo, my friend's father, assembled tiers of the artificial Christmas tree, the Roman skies unleashed a torrent of rain upon the wide neoclassical boulevards of EUR, a suburb Mussolini had once designed to house the forgotten 1942 World's Fair.

With a pile of ornaments steadily amassing on the living room sofa, I detected a theme.