O:JA&L Flash Discourse: Nonfiction
Personal Essay/Memoir/Vignette
Aldo Giovannitti
THE FONT
There, at the open-air chapel among the oaks on our hill in Italy last summer. The rows of stone benches faced the altar and the font. A hundred years of musk on them. The twenty, twenty-five of us.
I sat in the front row. Hold one twin, they said. I nodded and reached and got him without waking him. The function kept going, but my attention to it was gone.
I studied him in my cradled arms as the other went through the water. They took turns. He had sucked my mind into his, and now he owned it.
He didn’t weigh. The rugs of sun slipped through the vault of crowns and fell on some of us and on the stone benches and on the grass.
His skin. You could see through it. His sleep deep. He smells like strawberries when you get close! she had said. True. And the eyelids. The veil of capillaries and not much more shields his world from the world.
About the writer:
Aldo Giovannitti is an emerging writer based in London, currently at work on his debut novel. His writing explores moral ambiguity, illness, transformation, and alienation, spanning both fiction and nonfiction. A former World Bank aviation specialist and aerospace engineer, he lectures on the subject at universities in the US and France. He is a member of the Society of Authors and PEN America, and he has lived in the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, France, Holland, Thailand, and Kenya. He now divides his time between London and Turin. He was born in Campobasso, Italy, in 1987.
Image: A First Sacrament (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
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