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The Grief Eaters

By Erin Keating

 

There was a time when grave dirt could summon grief eaters from the Isle of the Dead. As the midnight bells tolled across the lagoon, they’d fly on ravens’ wings to mourners’ windows. With hands of bone, they’d clear minds of sorrow, feasting on memories until there was no remembrance left to mourn. But not all who called them to their side left with the dulled edges of forgetfulness. Grief eaters were hungry. Call them on a night when they were famished, and they’d leave you without so much your name.

Nunzia knew this. Still, she stuffed her pockets full of grave dirt before the priest had finished reciting the “Ave Maria.” Heads bowed beneath fluttering black veils, as though death were a kind of wedding: a marriage of body and earth. As they lowered her grandmother into the soggy ground, the priest spoke of ashes, and dust, and of rest so peaceful, Nunzia was half-tempted to follow after her.

After the funeral, the procession rowed from the Isle of the Dead back to the village. Cries of grief echoed through the settling fog. Voice called to voice, letting them know they were still there. Nunzia’s stomach roiled with the bobbing boat. Beside her, her mother, a pillar of black lace asked, “Are you well, Nunzia?”

Nunzia, never skilled at lying, managed, “Yes, Mamma.”

---

It was hard to lie in Nunzia’s family, sharing a roof as they did. Up and down the stairs of the neighborhood courtyard, her mother and father, her aunts and uncles, her cousins and siblings spoke of everyone’s business.

Grief did not quiet their houses. Long tables lined the courtyard beneath bougainvillea blooms, with Zia Emelia, Nonna’s younger sister, at the head. When there was no more room at the tables, mourners spilled out into the streets feasting and singing and telling stories.

It was what Nonna would have wanted: a life celebrated with life. But Nunzia, with her pockets weighed down with grave dirt and her stomach swollen with a secret, wished only for a moment of quiet.

The midnight bell had begun its long lament when Nunzia snuck away to her room tucked in the eaves of Nonna’s old house. She hoped that, through the haze of wine and smoke, the reveling mourners would not notice her go.

The quiet of Nunzia’s room folded her into its embrace. This small corner of the world was the only privacy offered to Nunzia: a bed huddled beneath the sloping ceiling, a desk littered with bobbins and pins shaping a skein of lace, a low table that she set with a tray stolen from the repast. Nunzia opened her window and gazed upon the canal lapping at stucco walls on its way to the lagoon. The silver-edged moon rippled on the water. On the horizon, the flickering lights of the Isle of the Dead kept their vigil.

She sank her fingers into the grave dirt in her pocket.

If Nonna had been with her, Nunzia would have told her everything. She would have confessed that her secret was the kind that grew inside her, stretching her body into unfamiliar shapes. She would have confessed that she and her sweetheart had snuck off during the rose festival, stealing a moment behind a trellis though they pricked themselves on the thorns. She would have confessed that he had offered to marry Nunzia when she told him about the baby.

If Nonna had been with her, Nunzia would have asked her what to do. Was she ready to give up her whole self to become someone’s mother? Was any woman ever ready? But Nunzia never had the chance. Nonna’s mind had not been her own at the end — past and present mingled until Nonna called Nunzia by her mother’s name.

Now, as every little thing reminded her of Nonna, as she and her family moved around the empty space she left in her wake, the unyielding ache in Nunzia’s chest had turned to desperation. If her plan worked, she would have answers. And if her plan failed, perhaps this would blunt the blade of grief.

Nunzia sprinkled the sill with grave dirt.

The stories spoke of ravens’ wings. They did not speak of the smell. The brine of the canals turned sweet, then sharp as spoiled wine. Darkness flew across the water from the Isle of the Dead, landing in a perch on Nunzia’s windowsill.

“Welcome,” Nunzia said. The darkness shifted and stretched, leaving the sill shaped like a bird but entering Nunzia’s room with stooped human shoulders. Robes hung around it, a patchwork of fine silk and rags and lace. The hood pulled up high, revealing only shadows where a face should be.

From the folds of its robes, the grief eater extended its white bone hands.

Nunzia recoiled from the closeness of death, though she kept that warm hostess smile that Nonna had worn so well. She gestured to a chair at her small table. “Yes, you are hungry, of course. But I thought instead of memories, you may enjoy some sweets.”

A distant laugh from the courtyard punctuated their silence. The grief eater did not move, simply kept its gaping face turned toward Nunzia. She had a plan, but now with a grief eater in her room and only desserts for a distraction, she could see it was a foolish plan — the kind Nonna had believed was worse than no plan at all.

Nunzia flicked her wrist the way her grandmother always did when she was explaining away trouble. “How about this? I’ll feed you, and you’ll give me memories in return. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?”

Nunzia lifted a lace napkin from the tray. Esse cookies curled across a plate smelling sweetly of lemon and vanilla. Steam swirled from a demitasse filled with rich espresso. “Nonna taught me to make these.”

The grief eater’s bone hands emerged again from the folds of its robe. Cold panic swept in like the tide. She had been wrong: she couldn’t bear to lose a single memory of Nonna. She would press each tender thought like a bruise. Her grief could not be softened with forgetfulness — it would only add to the aching absence. Nunzia closed her eyes and remembered her grandmother’s swollen knuckles as she kneaded dough at a flour-dusted table.

Please do not take this, Nunzia prayed, do not take all I have left of her. Then, as everything that could go wrong unspooled before her, I am Nunzia, I am Nunzia, like she had repeated to Nonna so often in those last days. Let her keep her name. Let her keep herself. Let her time flow always in the right direction. Let —

The quiet snapped with the tell-tale crunch of biscuits.

Nunzia peeked one eye open, then another. The grief eater ate. It held the esse in the shadows of its hooded face, the hollow echoing with all the sounds of chewing.

Nunzia sighed. Nonna would not have been afraid, but Nunzia’s throat had gone tight with fear in that quiet. It took her an age to find her words again, “You may enjoy them dipped in espresso.”

The grief eater’s robes fluttered in surprise. The bone hand dipped an esse into the espresso, and when it disappeared into the darkness of its hood, a low note hummed through the room like a dirge. The grief eater ate and ate until the tray of cookies held only crumbs and drops of espresso dotted the lace tablecloth. It rose, movements jittery.

Nunzia thought it was leaving, making itself small enough to fly from her room. She had not gained anything, but she had not lost anything either. Until the grief eater staggered forward and pressed its bone hands to Nunzia’s cheeks.

---

A girl with her tumbling curls tied back stood on a rock battered by sea spray. The light cast a honeyed glow of memory. Far below, on the shore, other children watched, enraptured. A shrill voice cried, “Sissy, don’t!” while the others called, “Lucia, Lucia, Lucia!” A breeze sweeping down through the hills carried the scent of the lemon groves. The gulls winged overhead. In a leap like flight, Lucia sang as she jumped into the sea.

---

Then, Nunzia was back at her table, the grief eater’s hands on her face and her eyes stinging with tears. That was Nonna as she’d been at the sharp edge of girlhood, a person in her own right before she had become a mother, and a grandmother, and had kept everyone else’s worlds turning. Nunzia had never heard stories of a girl with knobby knees and scraped elbows, jumping into the sea like returning home. Her chest loosened. Her last memory of Nonna had been holding her hand through the bedsheets, because she’d said Nunzia’s hands were too cold. Now, it was this.

“Thank you,” Nunzia whispered. The grief eater nodded, hopped up into the window, and winged away.

---

The next morning, Nunzia settled into the kitchen to find Mamma and Zia Emelia already there. Their house was full of early risers, but somehow Nonna had always managed to be the first awake, cooking while the rest of her family dreamed.

“I am not a perfect woman, Nunzia,” Nonna had told her once, when she had caught her granddaughter studying the ease with which she moved through the kitchen. “But any number of sins may be forgiven by keeping my family well fed.”

“Good morning, cara mia.” Mamma kissed her cheek, fingers sticky as she sank them into soft focaccia dough. “Were you crying? Your face is puffy . . .” Mamma studied her, and Nunzia quickly pulled away.

“Hey!” Zia Emelia swatted at Nunzia’s mother with a dishtowel. “Let the girl cry if she wants to. Eat, Nunzia, eat. You must keep your strength up,” Zia Emelia said, as though grief were a battle that required fortitude.

In the lines of Zia Emelia’s face, Nunzia could see the traces of the girl that stood on the shoreline and told her sister not to jump.

“You too, Zia,” Nunzia said. “Sit, let me help with that. Tell us a story about Nonna from when you were little, eh?”

“Oh, you don’t want to hear about all that, do you? It was such a long time ago, and Lucia didn’t like talking about herself.”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know,” Nunzia pressed.

Nunzia passed the morning in a hot kitchen with her mother and great-aunt amid the smell of rising dough and Zia Emelia’s voice rolling like waves: a childhood spent on a sun-drenched shore, Lucia as a young girl leaping into the sea from the tallest rock. Nunzia had seen the moment with her own eyes, but it moved her again, hearing the love and fear ringing in Zia Emelia’s voice.

Mamma cried as they baked. “I’d never heard that story before,” she whispered. “Why wouldn’t she have told me something so lovely? Mothers keep such strange things from their daughters.”

“She didn’t tell you because she didn’t want you jumping off of those rocks like she did, that crazy girl,” Zia Emelia laughed through her tears.

“What strange things haven’t you told me?” Nunzia teased Mamma.

“Or you me?” Mamma raised an eyebrow.

Nunzia shrugged and cut lemons into slices as clear as stained glass. The words lingered on her tongue, turning sour. She couldn’t tell Mamma. Not yet. Not until she made her choice.

Nonna would have decided with her unquestioning sense of self. Nunzia had never moved through the world with Nonna’s certainty — even less so now that all that was left of her grandmother were recipes passed down through tireless hours. She had to see Nonna again to know.

---

That night, Nunzia picked grave dirt from the seams of her funeral dress and spread it across the windowsill.

“Let it be enough. Let it be enough,” she intoned.

The lanterns of the Isle of the Dead winked. A breeze rose like the smell of a lemon grove as a streak of darkness winged toward her window.

“Thank you for coming.” Nunzia took a cautious step back: unsure if this was her grief eater, if it remembered her, if it had arrived hungrier than yesterday.

The grief eater flicked its bony wrist as it took shape — hesitantly at first and then with great flourish — as though to say, it’s no trouble at all. It settled itself at the table. The panic in Nunzia’s chest loosened.

Beneath the lace napkin, Nunzia revealed generous slices of olive and lemon focaccia, flakes of sea salt catching the candlelight like cut crystal. A glass of white wine sat beside it. The grief eater ate greedily, hunks of bread disappearing into the void of its hood, the only sound of chewing and slurping wine. But then it slowed and held out the last piece to Nunzia in its skeletal hands.

“Thank you,” she whispered. She ate slowly, savoring the tartness of the lemon and the brine of the olives. Her stomach lurched, but she was growing used to the sensation.

When the grief eater had supped and drank, it swayed a little in its seat. Nunzia found herself unsure of the silence.

“I learned to make focaccia from Nonna. We all did,” she murmured. “Hers is even better than mine. I wish you could have tasted it.” But the grief eater shook its head and picked the crumbs and salt from the plate with a satisfied sigh.

“May I have another memory?” Nunzia whispered. She understood how memories were something one could hunger for, how she could gorge herself on Nonna’s voice. Nunzia still thought Nonna was perfect despite all her insistence to the contrary.

In response, the grief eater’s bony hands emerged from its robes and rested on Nunzia’s cheeks.

---

Lucia danced in a piazza, high heels abandoned so she could sashay across the cobblestones. Lights hanging from balconies formed new constellations. The world revolved in the orbit of her twirls. The horns and strings of the band fell into the rhythm of the steady shush of the water against the walls of the canals. Couples began to pair up, girls in layered skirts like rose petals, boys with their ties long discarded and shirts halfway unbuttoned. But Lucia danced, pulling a young Emelia from the shadows, serenading her until her protests turned to giggles. A gaze smoldered against Lucia’s back. Across the piazza, a young man looked at her over the head of the girl in his arms to stare in wonderment. Lucia sang and danced without regard: her voice like a bell and her limbs like water.

---

Nunzia startled back to herself with a laugh on her lips. She had recognized the lovestruck face of her grandfather, gone three years now. Nonno never quite lost that look of wonderment, even after sixty years together. She’d heard the story only once before of how, when Nonna’s family disapproved of the romance, Nonna convinced all her relatives one by one to attend the wedding, because she was getting married to Nonno whether they liked it or not. But Nunzia had never heard of the time before there was a story: when Lucia was simply a young woman all to herself, dancing in a piazza. She wished she could have known her then — confided in her, as she could not confide in her now.

“I have no more grave dirt,” Nunzia confessed. “But if you come again tomorrow, I will have more food ready.”

The grief eater gave a familiar little flick of its wrist. It folded itself up in its robe, smaller and smaller until Nunzia didn’t know how it could contain such vast memories, before it hopped up into the window and flew away.

---

Nunzia slept late the next day, waking to the sound of her cousins racing down the hall. The pluck of a guitar and wheeze of an accordion traveled up the stairs from the courtyard. “Sleeping beauty wakes,” Zia Emelia’s youngest daughter — closer to Nunzia’s age than Mamma’s age — twirled her as she emerged groggily from her room.

Friends and neighbors passed through the courtyard, drawn to the music. At the center of the spinning crowd, one of Zia Emelia’s grandsons danced with the girl they all knew he was sweet on, even though the cousins teased him. Nunzia smiled at her sweetheart as he gamboled over the uneven cobblestone with her mother. He winked as he passed her. He had not made her give him an answer, and he would not broach the subject of marriage again until she’d had time to think. She loved him for that.

Zia Emelia sat at a table in the courtyard with the rest of her daughters, trays piling high with crisp bread and savory spreads as they made cicchetti for their gathered friends.

“Lucia would have loved this,” Zia Emelia said as Nunzia settled in beside her. “A little dancing, a little romance.”

“Did Nonna fall in love easily?” Nunzia asked.

“No, no. She was too focused on her lacemaking and on having fun — a bit like you in that way,” Zia Emelia teased.

“Then how did Nonno win her over?” The grief eater hadn’t shown her that memory, and the lack rolled through her stomach like hunger.

Zia Emelia shrugged. “He never interrupted her dance.” She told the enraptured table about an evening in a piazza drenched in red wine and summer heat, and all the boys that Lucia turned down. She chose her partner at the end of the night — the one young man who had not tried to steal her fun for himself.

“Your Nonno was a terrible dancer,” Zia Emelia laughed, “but she danced enough for the two of them.”

“Why hadn’t you ever told me this before?” Nunzia scolded.

“Lucia got so mad when I told that story once! Said I would turn your Mamma into a heartbreaker!” Zia Emelia pressed a scandalized hand to her chest.

Nunzia sat with her great-aunt and aunties making cicchetti after cicchetti: with olive cream and pistachios, with pesto and tomatoes, with pecorino and parma ham, with robiola and fig. They made food for the friends and family who shared their mourning, but Nunzia made it as an offering. There was one more memory she had to see.

---

That night, Nunzia paced her creaking floor as the church tolled the midnight bell. Instead of grave dirt, she had placed a glass of red wine in the windowsill, the drink like a setting sun in the streetlight. Every few paces, she stopped to study the Isle of the Dead out over the lagoon, watching for shifting shadows. Then she saw it. Like a raven against the darkness, the grief eater winged toward the beacon of her open window.

“Hello!” Nunzia waved. Her voice echoed off the peach-painted houses.

The grief eater cleared the sill and straightened, glass of wine already disappearing into its hood. Then, it startled. Nunzia’s little table overflowed with toasted cicchetti, piled high even as it spilled off the platter. The grief eater pointed to itself questioningly.

“Yes, as much as you want.”

With a swish of its robes, the grief eater made itself comfortable at Nunzia’s table. It sat straighter, something familiar in its perfect posture. One by one, it ate the small-bites Nunzia had prepared, beckoning her to join with a flick of its wrist that Nunzia knew so well. Nunzia ate with a ferocity she had not allowed herself since she found out she was pregnant, as though her family would be able to tell that she was eating for two instead of one. Here, amid the sloped eaves of her room with the grief eater for company, she at last had nothing to hide.

When the platter had been cleaned of crumbs, the grief eater used the edge of its robes to delicately blot the place its mouth would have been. The wine was long gone, and a gentle quiet had settled over Nunzia’s room.

“I need to know how Nonna felt about becoming a mother — if she . . . if she felt like she lost herself to it, if she regretting giving herself to all of us,” Nunzia murmured. She wished she had thought to ask Nonna before time and illness had pulled loose the threads of her memories. “Could you show me Nonna when she was pregnant with Mamma?”

The grief eater rose unsteadily and held its hands out to Nunzia. She leaned her cheek against the bones.

---

The church bell tolled the hour — so late it was early. A cool breeze blew off the canals, fluttering the lace curtains. Lucia kicked at the thin blankets, her belly protruding beneath the sheets. Beside her, her husband slept. Even in dreams, his face was as awestruck as the first time he’d seen her dancing in the piazza. Lucia abandoned her attempts at sleep, donning her robe and stepping out onto the little balcony that overlooked the canals. Her hand fluttered above the curve of her stomach, not resting on it easily like so many other women did. Her eyes burned with such a fierce desire it could have scoured her skin. Years of waiting and wanting, of trying and failing, weighed that gaze. Tentatively, as though it might crack open beneath her touch, she brought her hand to rest on her stomach. So quietly that not even the canal could hear, Lucia began to sing. She swayed to the rhythm of the water. The sun began to rise.

---

The grief eater lifted its bony hands from Nunzia’s face. When it took a step back, it swayed gently, the same motion she had just seen in Lucia.

“You move like her,” Nunzia whispered.

The grief eater flicked its wrist in dismissal.

“See, just there,” Nunzia pressed.

The grief eater shook its hooded head. Then it pointed a bleached white finger at Nunzia.

“Like me?”

The grief eater nodded.

“But I —” Nunzia started. Could it be true? Could Nunzia have more left of Nonna than she’d thought? Not simply memories and recipes, but a way of moving through the world?

Nunzia thought of Lucia: before she was Nonna, before she was Mamma, dancing and singing, sleepless on a balcony, her body on the brink of becoming something else entirely. Nunzia let her fingers rest carefully on the hard knot of her own stomach, small but soon showing.

All those stories that fiercely private Nonna hadn’t shared — those moments of independence she had hoarded for herself. Lucia hadn’t lost herself to her family: she had kept pieces of herself so close that she didn’t even share them with Nunzia.

Motherhood would change Nunzia, but it would not erase her. It would become another part of herself: like her lace, like her food, like her quiet love.

Tomorrow, Nunzia would cook herself into absolution. She would give her sweetheart her answer. They would tell her family only when every single person had stuffed themselves full. It was what Lucia would have done.

The grief eater fluttered on the sill with a ruffle of ravens’ wings. It looked back hopefully at Nunzia.

“You are always welcome here,” Nunzia promised. “There will be plenty to eat.”

---

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was  “The Grief Eaters” by Erin Keating, and if you enjoyed that then check out more of her stories at her website, erinkeatingwrites.com.

Thank you, Erin.

I love a story that takes us backwards and forward through time to reveal relevant bits of information that shape the heart of the story. We begin at a funeral that is compared to a marriage, and end with a pregnancy, an upcoming birth, and a decision to move forward. The Grief Eater reveals the links between the past and the present, and while our main character worried about losing her own name as the Grief Eater feasted, she instead gained a deeper understanding of who she was. Even the expectation of grief is turned on its head.

This story touches on a universal fear – as I grow and change, will I lose myself? We romanticize the past, our childhoods where we were free, and bold and creative. Everything that comes after is a compromise, self-imposed limitations on who we really want to be. Children can see magic, but adults can’t. Once he grows up, Peter Pan forgets how to fly. And it is partially true! Every milestone comes with tradeoffs. My son recently confessed to me that he’s worried about the future because life will become so much harder when he’s an adult. It broke my heart a bit to realize he had seen our own worries and internalized them. I explained to him that it was true, life does become a bit harder when you’re an adult. But that by the time you get there, you’ve grown into it. You’re able to meet those challenges because you grow and learn and gain capacity along the way. You aren’t meeting the challenges of adulthood with the skills of a toddler. I hope it was reassuring. It sounded believable at the time. But I am on this side of adulthood, and he’s on the other. I’ll admit that the journey from there to here has a cost – I can’t remember perfectly what it felt like to be where he is now. I can only look back from here and remember the past, I can no longer see things in the other direction.

This story made me wonder if I have betrayed my younger self. Did I ignore my inner child when I had my own children? Motherhood, parenthood, can be consuming. I have looked in the mirror and been unable to recognize myself. Pregnancy changes a person’s DNA. My feet are a different size, my hair changed color and texture. I am literally, physically, genetically not the same person I used to be.

That’s the premise for a horror story. Yet Keating transforms the horror, the fear, the grief, into hope and resilience. Something that.. is possible to embrace bravely. We lose ourselves over and over throughout our lives. We change and shift and adapt, and still it is possible, like our main character, to never forget our names.

So tonight, I am going to gather my kids, and tell them some stories. Let them see who I was before I became their mother. I’ll tell them about the fights I would get into with my sisters. How I won the school science fair in 5^th grade, then heard my teacher say one of the boys deserved it more. The time I stole my mom’s car and snuck out of the house before I had a license. Or about the time my parents let me skip a day of school to drive down to Virginia Beach and run my first marathon. I was a person with goals and dreams, and those goals and dreams shifted over time, they changed, I made mistakes, I experienced loss. But I haven’t forgotten my name.