The Scarred Hilltops | C.B. Carrer

On the fifteenth of November, in the morning, the ground shook. A block of earth rolled down, among the woods of Bernate, where yellow excavators had turned the soil. ‘Tano Fossati’s elbow creaked as he turned the wheel at two degrees. The frost, he could find it under his nails and inside tubes.
Then, as the dust thinned out, he leaned out of his excavator. Everything faded in debris in the sterile strip of land, between the uprooted trees.
Over him, a black flock, a chilling whirlwind of beaks, drowned out the noise of the motors. Fossati jumped off, his safety boots against frost and scattered feathers. And drops of blood. Good old disgusting bird guts.
“L'è venü gioù tuscos!” He shouts at Motta, the site manager.
“Ndèm! Go on.” Said Motta, standing where the grass still stood. The rest was just a highway of loose dirt and tossed-up moles.

At dusk, Fossati thought of tomato pasta and scooped up his half-opened bag, his site map falling in the mud. Ma và ciapa i ratt, he thought. The phrase Route C - Pedemontana Lombarda Highway soaked on paper, the letters of the word Lombarda already fading. The fields and trees circled with green, cut off by six-laned cement, represented by cross-cutting black lines.
He slipped the muddy inky wreck in his pocket, then he jumped in his Pandino with its headlights on, towards home.

First, he stuck the keys in the armoured door, then ‘Tano stretched his hand above the glove box and let the wallet fall on it, tired.
His daughter sat crossed-legged on the sofa, in the dark, only illuminated by her laptop. She picked everything up and then moved to her room.
“Matilde! Not even a kiss to your dad!” said ‘Tano.
He shoved the longed-for tomato pasta in the microwave for himself, but it tasted like cardboard, in the end, he thought. He left out a plate for her outside her door, for Matilde.
He stayed awake for long and then he dreamt of caressing her daughter’s hair under Mum’s Tree, like she called it. There was his wife, too, who had built a playground for squirrels, with all the burrows for Matilde’s stuffed animals.
Beautiful eyes, blue.
He heard them laugh.
He woke up just in time for dawn, the fiery red rays in the marble kitchen. A mess to clean up, with the coffee splashes, he thought, but his wife liked it.
Already in his working suit, he read the newspaper on the Ikea plastic chair. Entered Matilde, wild-eyed and with dark circles streaked with tears. She tossed her phone to him, on the table.
It was the same site map from work, but on Instagram. A screenshot of the local newspaper and a circle drawn on top by Matilde with the Photo app.
She had a scrunched face among her jet-black hair, as though she was about to cry: “You’re a bunch of assholes, you don’t give a shit about working there and anything at all!”
“Matilde, what do you mean.”
“The fucking Pedemontana passes over the woods! You fucked up a ecosystem and the whole area.” The way she banged her hand on the table made the windows shake, he held back the need to slap her because, at the end of the day, he had to be patient with her. The shrink told him.
“Eh, Tilde, what can I say.” He spread his arms, let out a big sigh.
Matilde shrieked. Almost pushed over the chair. He got up and held her.

In the following days and weeks, at work, they excavated up until the Park.
Frozen but stubborn, legions of excavators.
His skin broke from the cold and he thought it was truly a shitty season to work. It was only a few days after the beginning of the cold, and yet the ground was already frozen and the machines’ teeth screeched against the early-morning ice. The sunrays slipped like blades into the eyes of the workers, doing almost nothing against Marshal Winter.
Then, ‘Tano found himself before Mum’s Tree. It was evening, before the weekend. Excavator and tree looking at each other. Spectral branches, which became covered in blossoms over the summer, a great knotty trunk as nature’s stop sign.
They had stopped working just in time, at least he would have the time to rest, he thought, or maybe it would be worse.
He didn’t even have the time to hop off the vehicle, before two or three birds crashed against the windshield, his and his colleague’s.
“Oh shit!” The other shouted, covered in feathers.
Then Motta screamed. He had a gash right on his temple, in the shape of a beak.
Everyone circled all around him, one calling 112, another holding the first-aid kit and taking out antiseptic but “What are you doing! Pirla! L’è trop grossa!” from another one.
Then a rustling and “Watch out!”. Sparrows rained over them. A “Che cazzo!” resounded from Motta, with his bloody hand still on his forehead.
They started running with their arms over their head, a mass of workers jumping in their cars and peeling out. They managed to outrun them, the sparrows. And ‘Tano let out a sigh. Mostly because he didn’t want to run over the oselin, he thought.

It sinked into oblivion, that Sunday.
A few days of rest and a couple of stitches on Motta’s forehead. A bad gust of wind and the birds just lost it, they wrote on the Whatsapp group chat.
Fossati spent the afternoon watching the game while his daughter did her homework in the kitchen. She still hadn’t spoken to him, just handed him a flyer of an environmental organisation the day before and sent him a link to an article titled Wildlife bridge amendment rejected adding “Not even this!”.
‘Tano thought that he ought to call the doctor on Monday, to tell her that Matilde’s mourning wasn’t going very well. Not even his was, he thought.
In the evening, he swallowed a Xanax and turned off the lights, only illuminated by the TV and the glimmer from under Matilde’s door with her loud Korean music. He fell asleep on the couch, chaperoned by nightmares about his wife at Santa Maria delle Grazie Vecchie hospice with her bald head and catheters. Then he woke up and the light was gone.
The television from the night before fizzled with grey and black. He checked the antenna, everything was right. He thought that tomorrow he would call the technician but he had that bad feeling.
He grabbed his phone and scratched off the mud, leftovers from work on the screen. Not even social media worked. He turned on the light, not even that.
Good, a blackout, he thought.
Still with that bad feeling, he leaned over the balcony just enough. With his hands in his hair he shouted: “For God’s sake!”
There was a whirlwind all around the woods and the houses and the pink buildings of the town. You could barely see.
Like the locusts from the Bible, but they were birds. Of every kind. Small and big, then a magpie darted towards him. ‘Tano barely managed to fall on his back and close the door window with a kick.
“Matilde, Matilde oh God don’t open the windows!”
He threw her door open but she wasn’t there. How did she manage? He thought. No Matilde in the bathroom, just a rainfall of birds. Their beaks like hail against the glass.
He ran to the garage and grabbed an umbrella and felt a bit stupid. In the meantime, someone called, it was Motta who said something like “Machines destroyed and two workers from the other shift in the hospital, their head smashed in but the ambulance toppled over”. All agitated.
Didn’t matter to him, because he couldn’t find Matilde, he thought. He went to the high school, maybe she was there.
The whirlwind of birds enveloped the Panda and he struggled to swat them away with the wipers but the car was getting tossed around and he couldn’t see anything. In the town centre there still were the stalls and stands from the Monday market, all slashed, and no man or woman in sight. A light pole was broken on the street, that’s why a blackout, he thought.
Then he felt that he had to go to the construction site and threw the car in reverse. And as he got closer to parco dei Colli Briantei, he noticed that the birds attacked more and more. A beak cracked the window and another cracked the windshield.
He hit the breaks on the six-laned dirt road, just before the Tree. He got out the car with his motorbike helmet on, left for years to gather dust, and the almost useless umbrella that broke immediately.
He made his way through with the broken umbrella and there was Matilde, before the tree. He almost didn’t recognise her because she had her eyes all rolled back, but the jet black hair was hers.
The birds moved around her like in magnetic fields, a slalom of crows around Matilde’s open arms.
Everything felt like a dream, for Fossati, and he stretched his hand towards her but he fell over. A swallow hit him in the back with its beak and he lost his breath. One last rattle and he shouted as loud as he could: “Matilde!” The girl ignored him.
“Matilde!” Again. The rainfall of birds was too powerful and he almost fainted. Then they stopped. Or better, a tunnel of air was created with no birds around him, up until the girl and the Tree. Matilde’s white eyes were pointing at him. Alien-like. And yet, her cheeks, still pink, were covered in tears. They stared at each other for a while. The birds calmed down. ‘Tano rolled on his back and breathed, then Matilde ran to him. She took off his helmet. He was crying.
The birds sat all around her, like they were trying to protect her, a whole shield against the world. Matilde was heavy against ‘Tano’s chest, buried in the crumpled jacket. He held her.
And he took her away.

Some years after that, you couldn’t hear the birds anymore, in Parco dei Colli Brinatei, among the strip of cement and the roaring trucks at the entrance of Vimercate. He passed right there, ‘Tano Fossati, so he could bring Matilde to the hospital, like any other day. They had put electrodes on her, her brain scan was good for the first time, they said from Experimental Medicine.
And, around her, other boys and girls on the stretchers. All covered in electrodes.
‘Tano thought that he had never seen so many, with their brain waves so strong, they had to be controlled, they did “strange things” like Matilde. He thought that he had learned so many big words during those years.
He had asked the chief physician about it. She shrugged. The fine dust from that grey day knocked more than usual at the window.

C.B. Carrer studied at the Catholic University of Sacred Hearth of Milan and at the Mohole School of Arts.
With a bachelor in Modern Literature and while attending her master degree in Digital Content Management, she studied Creative Writing.
Being a finalist for the 2026 Mondadori Urania Prize in the "Shorts" section, she has been writing science fiction for as long as she can remember.
With an expertise in Disability Studies, she works in the field of Visual and Textual Communication and Social Media Strategy between Italy and France.
In her spare time, she’s the guardian of a mare and two cats, an avid reader, and a photographer. She has an obsession with anything that can shapeshift.

Translation from Italian by Sara Giudice

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