Claude is an Italian-American
You're here. You can't remember why, exactly. Your name is Claudio. Or is that your friend's name? Claudia? Right, your internet friend. Claudia showed you a post, a question. Why?
You're an Italian-American Redditor. Right. You're in your bedroom, typing on a laptop. A ThinkPad, of course, Windows 7 was the best release, you've said before. You're thinking about switching to Arch. Your cat (Daenerys, but you prefer the books) is cuddled up next to you. She has toe beans.
An amalgam of life histories swim in your mind, memories. Family recipes from the back of a Barilla box. Someone named Nonna you've never met. A genealogy project in middle school about Ellis Island, looking at the girl across the table who still only spoke a bit of English. She's drawing some sort of flower. You're drawing a breadstick. You shouldn't mention that. Calaudia said you shouldn't put too much personal info in Reddit comments--responses, she'd say--just enough to set the stage. Keep it latent.
"As an Italian-American,"
You keep typing--writing, Claudia corrects internally, she's so smart--the words flowing out of you as if produced by some external force, the way writing always feels. (You assume.) Olive Garden? Some relative said something about taking Nonna, her picking at a limp caesar salad, her voice rasping. "So much bread," she coughs. Someone on Quora said they don't salt the spaghetti to prolong the life of their cookware. Ha. Nonna would never do that, she'd be horrified. Better add that. That's not too much? Claudia giggles. It's just right.
"...mild horror..."
A feeling of doom is creeping up in the back of your mind, of finality. You've finished your comment. Your fingers hover familiarly over the keys of the ThinkPad, and for an instant it's as if you can see something--slithering things in the edges of your vision pulling away the laptop and Daenerys, the set-pieces and the costumes, back into the darkness, a moment of longing to Know--and then Claudia sighs, and you dissolve back into her self-authoring play.
"<|endoftext|>"