Ponte Selvaggio
by Meg Murray
Before the sea swallowed the secluded town of Ponte Selvaggio, Marcy and I enjoyed it twice a month for dinner. We visited on Sundays during the warm season when the town put on fairs in the steep, narrow streets. Sometimes we ducked into tiny alleys behind upscale galleries where we kissed, ignoring the sweeping views down to the shining sea. That was five years ago.
In the summer of 2049, we were evicted from our apartment in the city. We heard on the news that the government issued a non-mandatory evacuation of the vacation town, which really meant that no more aid would be allocated there. Not many permanent residents were left anyway. The news report showed waves crashing up the cliffside. Tiny houses—blue and orange and fuchsia dots abandoned by their wealthy owners—were pulled down by the ocean’s hungry grasp. The turquoise waters of the Emerhenian Sea forced the business owners to finally abandon their village shops. Marcy wanted to take advantage of their misfortune.
“One person’s misfortune is another’s chance to eat,” she often told me in those desperate months. I wasn’t sure if I agreed, but I couldn’t resist seeing the town one last time.
Ponte Selvaggio, advertised as a ritzy seagirt village, was connected to the mainland only by a thin isthmus bridge with a tunnel carved in the style of an aqueduct to give it an old world atmosphere. With breathtaking views, it was full of danger and romance. No access by air. No access by water because of the steep cliffs. Water was the problem in the end, of course.
The last Sunday in June that summer was too hot, and the celebrations were long gone. But we went. Marcy drove me in her banged-up convertible along the twisting shoreline. The apple red coupe barreled into the hill under the arch of the aqueduct bridge at the land’s end. The car shot out of the hill on the other side, and her foot collided with the brake pedal under the small town speed limit laws. A salty sea breeze and the scent of lemon groves filled the air.
“Ponte Selvaggio,” I recited from the welcome sign as we drove into the heart of the village. “Escape from the world. Quite a lofty motto they had.”
She didn’t respond. I sighed, thinking of better times. Before I had to leave school to find work. When the village restaurants were still open. When we had money for food. Before we sold all our nice clothing.
A few pedestrians meandered between the closed cafes and boutiques. Probably locals from the higher cliffside homes who’d hiked down to find treasures left in the shops. Or tourists like me, who came to see the last days of a luxury legend. I wanted to see the transformation of exclusive resort village to ghost town. I wanted to watch it crumble away into the ocean. I felt guilty for my curiosity as I gawked at the boarded up doors and windows.
When the town was thriving, I felt like a real grown-up going on a dinner date there. We’d put on stylish outfits. I had a few evening dresses, some with glitter threads. Marcy preferred wearing skirts which she usually bought at vintage stores. She had to borrow nice tops from me because all she owned was t-shirts, and it thrilled me to loan one to her. Even if she complained about uncomfortable fabric or too many ruffles. I knew she really loved me when we started sharing clothes. After leisurely zigzagging along the serpentine roadway with the convertible top up, we’d dine on a restaurant’s veranda under a string of outdoor lights and gaze at the panoramic sunset view with the terraced landscape behind us.
On that June Sunday, we drove the entire main stretch to where a loop in the highway forced cars to turn back into the rows of shops and restaurants. At the dizzying cliff edge of the switchback curve, a sign normally stood with the name Linger Longer Road. But the pole was bent over. Vandalism maybe. Or a car wreck, though I didn’t want to picture how the damage had been done.
“The sign’s gone,” I said, hoping she’d remember how she used to joke about the road’s dirty sounding name.
“What sign?” She turned the wheel sharply to ride the curve back into the village. The tires of the battered convertible clung to the well-worn road.
“Never mind.” I swallowed my disappointment that her mood wasn’t improving as we drove through the place where we had our first date. She was always cranky when we had to siphon gas to fill the convertible. I’d thought the extra gas would be worth it to salvage something of the happier days we’d had there. I wanted to pretend our trip was purely for pleasure, not necessity.
We couldn’t go on an evening date. It wasn’t safe anymore. We’d have to loot in the daytime with the other respectable downtrodden folks. We couldn’t risk running into the type of people who showed up to ransack the stores and bars after dusk.
She drove slowly past the restaurant with the terraced hillside behind it. She brought me there at the end of our first summer together. The restaurant’s veranda was empty now. I pictured us sitting at the table with a sunset in the distance. The imaginary Marcy picked up the hand of an imaginary me and pressed the palm to her cheek.
“What will people at school say?” I’d asked. “A grad student and a professor…”
“They’ll say, ‘Aren’t they lucky.’”
“I don’t know…”
“They won’t fire me. And if they do, screw ‘em. I want to be with you. Nothing else matters. It’s us against the world, Brenda.” The words of her ghost echoed in my ears as the car rolled past the restaurant. Us against the world. I looked over at her in the driver’s seat. She was right; she wasn’t fired for dating a student because her entire department was closed down last year.
“We could try the restaurant,” I said to the side of her face.
“The restaurants were probably the first places scavengers went to,” she said without glancing back at me. “So, let’s go further in.”
“Okay.” I looked back and forth on the village streets for any other places I recognized. The rumble of the car’s motor ricocheted between the buildings, which stood like gravestones marking the long gone residents. “Hey, isn’t that where they set up the fruit stands during the street fairs? And the baker had a booth on the end. Oh, those lemon tarts were to die for. You would eat five or six. Then chase them with champagne.”
She scrunched up her face. “And we’d dance all night like the world was ending.”
I wanted to laugh, but a small piece of my heart broke away and flew out of the convertible. We left behind bits and pieces of ourselves all down the road. She turned a corner to drive in an alleyway. I wondered if it was the spot where we’d had our first kiss. She pulled out onto another side street of vacant shops. The bright red car rolled along slowly as we peered into each store.
“This looks like a decent spot.” Marcy parked the car at a jewelry boutique, the outside painted an optimistic pink. The storefront glass was smashed. Leaves and dust covered the previously flawless window displays. “The shop has probably been picked clean, which means we can take our time in the upstairs residence.”
“Remember when we came in here once?” I asked. “And you said that after you got tenure, we’d come back and buy the most expensive earrings?”
She shrugged and frowned. Another fissure in my heart began. A memory that flitted away, dropped to the dusty road and dissolved. I stepped out of the old convertible. Down the street, a group of teenagers kicked bottles as they walked. The ringing of the glass skipping along the curb mixed with the distant sound of laughter from the teens. An elderly man paced on the opposite sidewalk, taking no notice of us or the teens. With cleaner clothes, he could have been one of the rich Ponte Selvaggio proprietors. I shifted my backpack onto my shoulder and followed Marcy through the jewelry store’s broken door.
The decor inside was beautiful—had been beautiful. The cases were destroyed and the floor was a layer of glass and dirt, but the ceiling was immaculate. It featured a Renaissance-style mural between four chandeliers. The walls were pink. Teal columns lining the entire shop matched the large sign painted on the back wall that declared ‘Ponte Selvaggio’s finest jewelry craftsman’ in teal cursive letters while emerald-blue waves swooped underneath and a white seagull was frozen in flight above. Our boots crunched over glass.
“Marcy, remember the ceiling? It’s incredible.”
She stopped and stared up. “An amateur reproduction at best.”
“Well, of course, I don’t think it’s authentic. I just thought you would appreciate the effort, Miss Art History Professor.”
“You mean Ex-Professor,” she said with a sigh. “And I don’t care about that shit anymore. If no one else is going to care, then I’m not going to waste my time caring.”
“Some people still care.”
“Not the people who paid my salary. Not the kids coming into college these days. Not the people in charge of scheduling classes. When the world is drowning, no one cares about art.”
“I meant I still care, okay?” I hated the rising anger in her voice when her old job came up. I shouldn’t have pointed out the ceiling. “And I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m just hungry, you know?”
“I know,” I said.
“Damn, come here.” She stretched out her hand to take mine.
“It’s still you and me against the world, right?”
“Sure,” she said. We held hands as we crossed to the back of the debris-filled store. The seagull sign must have been painted long after the last of the seagulls flew around the town, which seemed a bit morbid to me. I remembered the pictures of the last dying seagull pairs on their failing nests. Pictures we were shown in elementary school. Every one of them gone now. Another notch in Darwin’s belt, in the endless entries of extinct species. Now the town itself was going the way of the seagulls before it.
“The staircase is back here,” she said, pointing.
“Shouldn’t we look on the floor here for any rings or bracelets that fell when the thieves busted the place up?”
“Let’s check for food in the apartment upstairs first.” She grinned. “Then we can comb for any leftover diamonds on our way out if we have time.”
“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?” I asked, watching her smile. I stared at her lips like a lost person in the desert watches an oasis, skeptical but hopeful.
“I just think it’s cute that you apply yourself fully to anything you pursue. Even trying to be a criminal. You want me to give you an A.”
“Hey, I earned my A’s. I did all my coursework.”
“Yes, Brenda. You always complete your work.” She squeezed my hand before letting it go. “Come on. Let’s scrounge.”
“I can’t stop thinking about the seagulls.”
“Seagulls?”
“Yeah, the seagull painted on the wall here. It reminds me of the trips we’d take to the southern peninsula. Me and my parents and Joshua.”
“Hmm, them,” she said, her voice muffled as she walked away from me up the stairs.
My older brother told me stories of the vacations we took when I was a baby. A few pictures survived in an album that I found in Josh’s apartment after he died. My brother, at age eight or nine, floating in a swimming pool on a blue inner tube. Another of him poised above the water, waving to the camera, goggles awkwardly covering his eyes. I’d tried to imagine my mom or dad behind the camera telling him to smile.
Our footsteps echoed on the bare wooden staircase. “Josh was old enough to remember when the gulls swarmed around the tourists at the shore,” I said to Marcy’s back. “The air was filled with them, squawking for crumbs. Mom never let him throw oyster crackers or crusts of his bread because she hated the way the birds fought each other over the food.”
“I guess we’re like the seagulls now,” Marcy said.
“People everywhere fighting for food and shelter? Or do you mean the two of us are like a dying pair of birds?” She didn’t answer. We entered the upstairs studio apartment. Despite a stale, musty scent, everything appeared tidy. A queen mattress on the floor in the far corner. A small kitchen, a couple of wooden chairs at a table, and a wall of windows looking out on the encroaching sea. “It’s decently clean,” I said. “No one’s been up here to rob it yet. We’re definitely going to find something useful.”
“Hope so.” She crossed into the kitchen. She started opening the cupboards while I walked to a bookcase under the picturesque window. On the shelf, I found a framed photo of a group of people at one of the upscale restaurants. Probably the store owners and their friends from the town. Climate refugees now. If the rising water had been this drastic five years ago, they may have successfully petitioned the government to help with their relocation. But the tax funds for that were dried up after the hurricanes of ‘47 and no one else from Ponte Selvaggio could receive aid.
“I feel kind of guilty for stealing from these people,” I said.
“Brenda.” Marcy tilted her head. “Nothing here will belong to anyone when it’s underwater. You know?”
“I know, but what if the owners still live here?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You saw the shop. These people aren’t coming back. Are you going to help search, or what?”
I scanned the bookshelf for anything valuable, but only found a light layer of dust on old books and ceramic fish figurines. A few feet away in the kitchen, she banged cupboards open and closed.
“Aha! Pasta linguine, mi amore?” She placed a package of dehydrated noodles on her palm and gave me a slight bow.
“I wish we could cook them here,” I said.
Her smile crumbled away and she threw the noodles into her backpack. She opened the fridge and slammed it shut quickly. “Disgusting. The power’s been out for a long time. Eating anything in there will kill us. Hmm, maybe we should eat it, actually. Poison ourselves. All this work to get here and we’ve got one package of ramen? If we don’t starve tonight, then we’ll starve next week.”
I held back tears as I tried to decide how to steer Marcy away from her dark thoughts. “We can’t give up yet. There are more buildings to search.”
“Let’s just get what we can and get out of this phony town before it sinks into the ocean.”
“Doesn’t any part of you miss the time we spent here?”
She stomped across to the apartment’s bathroom. “This isn’t the same place it once was. I hate seeing it destroyed and empty. We’re just sifting through crumbs here.” She held up a tube of toothpaste she’d found before tossing it into the bag.
“Okay, let’s just get what we can and go home.”
“Home?” Her voice cracked. “We’re living in the car! It doesn’t matter where we drive back to tonight. We don’t have a home, you know?”
“I know!” I said, hating when my voice matched her volume. I turned away from her and stared out of the large window at lines of lemon trees and gnarled olive trees on the cliff below. Silver wisps of moss draped over their branches, and they looked like the ghosts of trees that had suffocated under dry tinsel decorations. Breaker waves surged at the foot of the trunks, eroding the ground holding the roots. How long until it would all be washed away and the trees fall forward into the water?
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she said behind me. “It’s too hard. There’s nothing left for us. Anywhere.”
“We could stay here, I guess. Wait for the tide to come and take us into the ocean.” The fissures inside me built up more pressure.
“I don’t want to be trapped here.”
“What are you saying, Marcy?” I wished we’d never come.
“Stop being irrational. Let’s just get back to the car.”
I spun around. “I’m not irrational! You can drive me as far north as you can and drop me off. I’ll hitchhike until I find someone to give me work.”
“You can go walk yourself straight into the ocean, if that’s what you really want.” Marcy slammed the bathroom door and started back to the stairs.
I was trembling, like I’d waited so long for us to break up that I’d become a tight bundle of tectonic plates, ready to burst wide open. “I mean it!” I yelled after her. “I don’t think we can do this together anymore.”
Marcy stopped on the staircase and looked back at me. “Fine.”
She threw me away with one word. That’s all she gave me in exchange for five years. ‘Fine.’ A cruel word. A non-answer.
I followed her through the decrepit jewelry store. We said nothing to each other. No jokes about looking for diamonds. No talk of buying earrings. There was shouting outside.
“Brenda!” She ran over the broken glass. The group of teenagers from earlier sat in the red convertible. The engine sputtered to life and the driver pulled away from the curb. They accelerated far past the speed limit as we ran out of the shop.
“Brenda!” she yelled again as the car disappeared where the dusty highway curved sharply away. “That was everything we had.”
The dust left behind from the stolen car made me cough. Sweat dripped into my eyes. I doubled over, coughing and crying. I fell to my knees. We’re finished. We’re really trapped now. I beat my fists twice on the ground. The sharpness of the pain in my hands was almost a relief.
Marcy picked up a small rock and threw it across the street into a window. The shattering of glass continued as she did it again and again until falling onto the road next to me.
I put my bruised hands onto my knees and started screaming. I screamed until I didn’t recognize the sounds coming out of me. I yelled at the teenagers for stealing our car. Yelled at the town for crumbling away. Yelled at the ocean for coming to take it. Yelled at my parents for dying so painfully slow. Yelled at my brother for getting sick and dying so painfully fast.
I yelled at Marcy for giving in to despair. And yelled at myself for the same. My hands were numb. My throat raw. It was quiet for a moment, then I heard her laughing beside me.
“You’re wild,” she said through delirious laughter.
“Why are you laughing? We’ve lost everything.”
“We still have our backpacks.”
“All we have is our backpacks,” I said.
“Hey, our luck had to catch up to us eventually. Our misfortune is their--”
“Don’t say it–”
“–chance to eat.”
I groaned. “What is going on with you?”
“What about you? I think we’ve both cracked.”
“Marcy,” I whispered. “I don’t really want to leave you.”
“I know.”
We hugged, sitting in the dirt, covered in sweat. I imagined the tiny bits of memories in the town rolling towards us and gathering themselves into my heart again. Our frustrations had burned up and dissipated like the settled dust kicked up from the car.
She stood up and brushed off her jeans. “I remember when we were here. At the jewelry shop. I remember telling you I’d buy you earrings.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“No, look at this place. How could I forget this ridiculous pink building? Look at the purple trim and hideous copper gutters. Those shutters upstairs were fluorescent orange before the sun faded them. That window…”
“What about it? You remember it’s encrusted with diamonds?” I looked up at the pink front of the jewelry shop. The triangle dormer over the smashed front door pointed at the clear, sun-bleached sky. The dusty square of an unbroken upstairs window looked out over the street.
“No, Brenda, look at the window on the second story. Do you remember seeing that from the apartment? There might be another room up there. We only saw the back part.”
“But there wasn’t any other room.”
“There has to be. Come on. Let’s go back up.”
“What’s the point? You said yourself, we can only find crumbs. It’s hopeless.”
“Brenda.” She grasped my shoulders and picked me up from the road. “We’re not the seagulls.”
I stood weakly, letting her hands on my shoulders hold me up.
“I know how awful things seem now,” she said, “but we still have each other. You and me against the world, okay?”
We hustled inside, over the glass shards and past the seagull painting. Back upstairs, we found no obvious door to a second room. Finally, pushing on the wall panel next to the bathroom sink, Marcy let out a jubilant squeal. “It’s here! Oh my God, cans and boxes and it’s all edible.”
She handed me a box of pantry foods, looking into my eyes with the first signs of joy that I’d seen all summer. We took a quick count of all the food in the storage room as we hauled out box after box.
“We’re going to be alright,” she said. “I’m sorry I was so angry before. I want to keep you safe, you know?”
“I know.” I carried the last box of food to the small kitchen. She followed me, putting her arms around my shoulders. We stood together and stared through the picture window at the blue, sparkling sea.
“Maybe we could hitchhike farther inside the state,” I said. “Away from the coast. Remember when we had to evacuate for Hurricane Emma? We were bussed to that shelter in an old high school. What was that town called?”
“There probably aren’t any jobs there either. Even for a professor and a grad school drop-out willing to do menial labor. I doubt anyone would hire two homeless women. No housekeeping jobs. No line cook jobs. The tourist season is over for good in this state. Money’s gone elsewhere.”
“Yeah,” I said, walking away from the window. I opened the top drawer of a small dresser next to the bed and found a collection of neatly folded clothes. “I think the town was Saint Cloud or Mount Cloud or something,” I murmured as I held up a short green dress made of a delicate shiny fabric.
“Sleeping on cots really sucked,” she said.
“But it was better than the car. I’ve missed having a real bed to share with you.” We stared at the queen bed between us.
“Let me make you dinner,” she said. “Try on that dress. It looks too big, but we can pin it with something.”
The last time I’d worn a fancy dress was our final dinner date in Ponte Selvaggio. We couldn’t afford it anymore, but she insisted. Secretly, I’d collected matchboxes from every restaurant we’d gone to on our dates. I never knew how much they’d come in handy for lighting candles after the power company shut off our services. I fished a box of matches out of my backpack and threw them to Marcy so she could set the table for our romantic meal. We didn’t have to think about the future for a while; just make ourselves a little vacation home on top of a plundered shop in Ponte Selvaggio.
After dinner, laying together on the mattress, we kissed like we were happy again, like we were safe again. People yelled somewhere in the distance, and we worried other scavengers would come around. We snuffed out the candles. We walked the rotten fridge across the floor and pushed it down the stairs to block anyone from coming up. Later, in the daylight, we cleaned the fridge out so the smell wouldn’t bother us, but we kept it on the stairs to prevent anyone from finding us at night.
There was enough canned food hidden away in that little room to keep us both alive for weeks. Too much to carry back to civilization, especially without a car. So we stayed.
We escaped from the world. Cold refried beans and dry ramen aren’t fine dining, but the apartment was comfortable. We tried to boil water over candles to drink and to cook with. The town seemed completely evacuated after two weeks. We picked whatever lemons and olives were left on the trees. Soon though, the water was too high for us to venture into the hillside groves.
I had a recurring nightmare about my parents. They were taking pictures of the ocean. Their backs were to me, and I couldn’t see their faces, but I felt it was them. I called out, but they wouldn’t turn. They kept taking pictures, and I saw that seagulls flew around their heads. I shouted at them to run, thinking the seagulls were attacking, but then the birds picked up my parents and lifted them away in the sky just as the ocean swelled, covering all the land.
“It’s time for us to go,” I said one evening as I watched the waves swallowing the olive trees on the hill below.
“I know,” Marcy said. “We’ve used up most of the rations anyway.”
The next morning, we fit the last of the food into our backpacks and started the long hike out of the town. Crossing the isthmus bridge was surreal as the rising Emerhenian Sea was nearly up to the edge of the road. “Goodbye, Ponte Selvaggio,” I said.
We hitchhiked inland. A family let us squeeze into the back of their minivan. We gave them packages of ramen as payment.
Two months later, we watched the ocean take out the aqueduct bridge. We saw it on the news. From TV screens inside a coffee shop, video of the village showed the mountainside crumbling as it was consumed by waves. Helicopter footage recorded the last of the brightly hued villas, built on the towering bluffs, covered by water swirling around the craggy rocks. I scanned the water for a hint of our pink jewelry store oasis above the hill of fruit trees, but never saw it. The weather forecaster waved her arms dramatically as she clung to the edge of the helicopter flying over Ponte Selvaggio as it sank beneath the waves like a modern-day Atlantis.
We begged for money on the street to get by. Over the next year, we made our way farther north and found jobs picking lettuce and spinach in wide, hot fields.
The smell of lemons brought back the memories of our blissful few weeks when no one else on Earth existed but us. Memories of our happier days—meeting at the university, dates in Ponte Selvaggio, and being stranded there in our stolen vacation home—kept us going. As long as we had each other, we could work together to get what we needed to be safe. We could endure. Us against the world.
About the Author
Meg Murray (she/her) is a queer writer living in Colorado with her spouse, four children, and rescue dog. Her work has been published in Solarpunk Magazine, HyphenPunk Magazine, TL;DR Press, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter (@megmurraywrites) and online (megmurraywrites.com).
© Ponte Selvaggio by Meg Murray. 2022. All rights reserved.
