La Serenissima by Catherynne M. Valente

 

I remember, when I must remember anything, that it was always wet. Never since I was a girl did my feet grace a stair but that the embroidery of my shoes was soaked through, red thread to black, green to black, blue to black: rain–sodden, rimmed with street–mold. The doused hems of my skirts lapped behind me, leaving a trail of old rain, and I moved through the city like an exotic snail. I wore combs of bronze crab–claws in my hair, which was even then more silver than blonde, and on my fingers were knuckle–rings of coral, and around my waist was ever a belt of pearls. Yet still I walked alone on those jagged streets and no man would hinder me, for the snail of Venice moved through her city in the days of the eleventh Doge, the Idiot Soldier, who could neither read nor write, who compressed an incomprehensible cosmos of parchment beneath his great silver seal, and who was also my father. He called me Uliva, for the endless dusty groves of olives that waved in the sea wind, and it is Uliva who writes these things, who writes these things in the dark, upon strips of birch bark flattened with iron, who writes these things in cuttlefish–ink and sturgeon blood, whose shoes are now brighter than any she owned on the canal–bridges, but still wet, as wet as they have ever been.... More>>>