Ristorante Cinghiale

Giuseppi the sculptor was a vegetarian, but no one knew. The fact that he made life-size statues of the cinghiale, teeth bared, signalled to most of the town that he was in on their pig hunts. When he saw a wild boar that Tuesday morning, he yelled loudly for it to run, run, run away. For goddess’s sake, the animal had children somewhere. He could see her udders shake, with fear or with aggression, who knew. But he knew she had better run. He heard the rumblings of the hunters’ truck in the distance. 10:15 GMT+2

Matteo’s pizza bore strips of wild boar sausage, a heavy load. He tried to slice the sausage as thin as possible, but the millimeters of crisp dough barely held together. He tried crumbles instead, but no, the slices were the best option. He tried pre-cooking the sausage but that only made it hard and chewy. He’d have to ask his father how he made wild boar sausage pizza, but his father was in a nursing home in Florence and only had a brief lucid period each day. Matteo would have to get the timing just right for his call. 13:15 GMT+2

Alessandra capped a bottle of olive oil with a cork, just for now. She didn’t want to seal the first bottle of the new harvest with a metal lid just yet, both because she needed to run tests and because it was tradition to keep the first bottle for the family. Her children had hand-picked an entire tree, the lower branches at least, while the massive harvesters took down the rest. The earth shook along with the trees, and the cats hid under the wine barrels in the cellar. Tonight, she would take the first bottle of olive oil and drizzle it over the boar meat that was her husband’s share from the hunt in the early hours of the day. She’d sit down to a table covered with food that came from the land that she could walk around her home. Tomorrow, though, she thought through her exhaustion, they could order a pizza. 19:15 GMT+2

Cinghiale lowered her hooves into the thick grass to rip out the new spring onions. She knew she had to eat more, more, the children, they took it out of her. The fine bristles on her ears picked up sound, and she paused, sniffed. There wasn’t anything to do unless there was a sniff of danger. She trusted only that sense, not what she heard or saw. The smells told her dog, gasoline exhaust, a hint of cat food left on the porch of the old woman whose shoes were made of pig leather. She resumed gnawing on the roots of the plants. She watched the light on the path ahead of her and saw that there were still a few minutes until sundown. Time to finish this plant and find the babies in the tall grass. She had no need of a clock.

Jill Bronfman’s novel Thanks for Meeting Me Here won the 2026 Keepers of the Fire Prize from Raven Chronicles Press and was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Award. Among other awards for her fiction, essays, and poetry, Bronfman was one of 12 Aspiring Novelists Selected for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2025 and she was a Barnes & Noble National Essay Contest Grand Prize Winner. Her poetry chapbook, Second Cities, will be published in 2026. She has an MFA from Pacific University and teaches writing at all levels from graduate to kids. www.jillbronfman.com