Episodes 9 and 10: Homesick
Alessandra, Ralph, and Barbara’s Breakfast Bar
Excerpt of Episode 9
“It takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow.”
Thus spake Alessandra, in her speech to the mostly-white-haired Board of the Junior Foreign Aide Brigade. (That’s how Alessandra thought of her speech—at sixteen, she was a budding nihilist, misunderstanding Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a call to rather than a warning against a philosophy of nothingness. She was well on her way to driving her parents crazy with her philosophizing, and if they complained, she shot back with “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task,” and other exasperating Nietzsche-isms.)
Alessandra was a homegrown islander, and so, although love and creature comforts were available to her in moderate supply from the day she first graced this earth, she spent almost the whole of her childhood longing with every fiber of her being to get away.
The Junior Foreign Aide Brigade, or JFAB, seemed as good an escape plan as any.
Read the rest of Episode 9 here
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Excerpt of Episode 10
“I am leaving the pension,” her landlady says one day. Her landlady likes to practice her English with Alessandra, though she speaks it thickly, hesitantly. “I do not know if the new owner will rent to you.”
“Why?” Alessandra says, confronting the misery of change externally imposed. Is this what it feels like to be an adult? The constant thrust of unasked-for change?
“I am going to help my son start the wheat farm,” the landlady says.
“But you have no experience with farming,” Alessandra says. As if her landlady had asked her permission. Or even her opinion.
“Ah, Alessandra, all it needs to make the wheat grow is the sunshine, the dirt, the rain, the love.”
There is no rhyme or reason to it that Alessandra can divine, but suddenly there are tears streaming from her eyes, and then the tears turn to wracking sobs. She was wrong, all those years ago, declaiming to the JFAB Board, and now she knows it, and it’s too late.
