The year of 1348; ship’s coming from the east harbored in Italy carried dieses, the origin of the dieses was from china. Unprepared, the people of Italy caught the sickness and it spread rapidly. Within a short time the plague hit my city of Florence. Now I’m still here, in a city filled with the dead and dying.
My name is Gino Milano, 15 years old. It’s been one year since the plague came to Italy killing people daily. I had just turned fourteen when news came of the sickness and its horridness. But my mother, a strong woman, waved it off. We had just opened a bakery so we could do business and have a living area. We both spent all our time working for that, living on the streets and saving all the money we could to live a nice life. So when people were recommended to leave the city, my mother refused.
The plague came slowly at first. But when it got its hold on the city, it spread. My mother stood her ground and continued to stay. I knew she wasn’t being stubborn because of all our hard work. She just didn’t want to start over and return to our old life, constantly on streets, begging for money or jobs. So we stayed and watched as our city was over taken over by the plague.
There were three different forms of the plague. The first that is the most common, the bubonic, swells that appeared and grew the size of a small apple on the neck, armpits, or groin area. People lived longer with this form of the plague, about a week. Doctors said that this type came from the fleas on the rats bit people. The second is the pneumonic. It’s the most contagious. You catch it from breathing, meaning that this one attacks the respiratory system of the body. People live to the expectancy of two days. The last is the spetimic, which attacks the blood stream, with a couple day life expectancy.
My mother had the bubonic sickness. It had been a couple days and she’d been bedridden with pain and despair. I did not leave her alone, but I wouldn’t see her either. I would listen to her voice from the other rooms; my mouth covered with flowers, herbs, and a make shift mask. She shouted for me to go see her “Gino, Gino come here, I want to see you”. She always said this, and when I tell her no, she got angry. “Gino I brought you into this world! You ungrateful child, you should see your mother while she still has time!” It tore at me, listening to my mother; a woman who wouldn’t even let me call her “mother” would have to beg for me to see her. I didn’t call her mother so that If a time would come that she wouldn’t be with me, it wouldn’t hurt, but it did, it hurt with a burning passion knowing that she would leave me soon, that I want nothing more than to run away, and never have to witness that time, I was truly gratifying to have my mother call for everyday till her voice is horse.
It was the fifth day of Elsa’s, my mother’s sickness, she was still alive, I cracked the door to see her, but she was sleeping, it took most of my will not to retch where I stood, seeing the circles of dark red and purple over her arms, the tumors on her neck open and spilled over the sheets. The fear I had took over me, I ran, I ran and ran. I dodged the few people on the streets covering my mouth and nose with the herbs I grabbed from the bowl I always kept filled, averting my eyes from the corpses that were laid on the streets of the once beautiful town of Florence, now taken over with the dead and the few that stay for Lord knows what reason. I stopped a far ways away, near a park three miles from where our home used to be. I walked until I was behind bushes and retched, and I kept going, Hoping to get the feeling of guilt outside of me, the knowing that I left Elsa, my mother whom I loved dearly but also feared for the sickness she held.
I hid till the next morning in the trees my face covered with the rest of the posies I had in my pocket. When I had returned to the home I ran away from just a few hours before, I went to see Elsa, she was not in her bed, no, she was in my room, on my bed, curled in her arms my blankets. Her chest no longer rose and fell lightly as it had the day before, she did not reach or call out for me as she did before, she was still, not sleeping as I wished, begged for, and my mother was dead.
The horrors that I thought would have taken over me then did not consume me as I wish they would have. I stayed starring at my mother, thinking of all the times she called for me in the two days of life she didn’t know she had left, the last two day’s I never went to her. I cowered at her voice, she wanted to see me, the son who she fought for day after day and loved unconditionally. The only family that in my knowledge she had left, the only thing that she had left to live for, had run away from her. I had only thought of myself and ran, to think, that she knew she only had that one last night to live, and the last thing she ever wanted, was to see her son, me.
How horrific of a person am I, to take everything away from someone who had done nothing but give me everything, and throw it away. How could I have ever repay her, I couldn’t do anything anymore, the country which I was trapped in was worthless, the person, the only person I then realized was all I had left, I spit in her face and she was gone now, there was nothing I could do.
There was no burial, just a burning building, it has been a year and a few months to that day since then. I have done nothing since then but walk and pray for my mother’s soul and my forgiveness that I hope with my life that I am losing I have from my mother. Now I am being dragged into an alley with the other diseased people who can no longer move, I can do nothing but repent for the last minute of my life. My name is Gino Milano fifteen years old and the only son of the deceased Elsa Milano.