“Property Values in Pompeii Are Trending Down” by Kevin B

Property Values in Pompeii Are Trending Down

As the lava poured forth from the gaping hellmouth, Elenzia realized she should have taken a different route to work.
Her husband had warned her over their morning coffee that smoke was billowing out the top of Vesuvius, but it had done so many a time, and gone were the days when it would send all the citizens of Pompeii fleeing to the water.
For a time, there were weekly volcano drills, wherein the village crier would run about screaming “Eruption! Eruption!” and all would gather in the square to calmly take attendance before loading into boats and rowing out to what they imagined would be safety. Elenzia recalled seeing the family dog, Paco, on the shore, whimpering for her to come back.
“It’s all right, Elenzia,” her mother assured her, as the boat rocked and tilted in the forever choppy seas. “This is just a test. If the volcano were actually erupting, we would take sweet Paco and all the animals in Pompeii with us.”
Her mother died not long after from a bad bout of indigestion. A short while later, the drills went from monthly, to bi-monthly, to annually, to nil.
Elenzia tried recalling when the last one was, as she sat atop her steed while the liquid fire roiled past her, and she could not place the last date wherein they had prepared for this. It was possible that an entire generation of Pompeians were now ignorant to emergency protocol, and the village crier had been eaten by a bear a decade ago.
Her husband had tried to convince her that a move might be in order. He took an interest in geology after she bought him a chiseling kit for his thirtieth birthday, and along with it came a paranoia for Vesuvius, that quiet neighbor who never bothered anyone other than the occasional belch of smoke.
“One day, it’ll erupt,” Marco warned, “and when it does, I fear we won’t have time to flee.”
His neuroses always manifested at the oddest of times.
She didn’t suspect that he was wrong, but she held the belief that wherever one lived, there were bound to be dangers and trappings. Pompeii was known to have some of the most stunning views in all of the Ancient World. How could one expect to wake up every day to such beauty without knowing there would one day be a price for it?
The issues she had with the ever-growing city were more immediate. Taxes were going up all the time. Cost of living was exorbitant. Traffic was becoming unbearable.
Why, it took her nearly three hours to get to work at the temple, where it was her job to prep the virgins for sacrifice. One needed to be fed to Vesuvius every week, if they wanted to continue existing peacefully below its sensitive tip.
Nobody wanted to use local virgins since they were highly coveted. Instead, they tossed holy men and women into the peak’s pit toward the end of their lives, so that there was no real sense of loss to the community
That lasted for two years, and then they ran out of priests and priestesses. For a month or two, they would throw unattractive virgins in, after receiving confirmation from the town that no one would marry them, not even Bianzo the Blind, but once that group was depleted, they had to start importing virgins from the East, and all that importing wasn’t cheap.
“What if we just drew pictures of virgins and threw those in?” asked Mayor Sincozzi at the city meeting, right after the slitting of a goat’s throat. “Would the volcano really know the difference?”
That was how a decision was reached to temporarily suspend sacrifices to Vesuvius, and while Elenzia was not as paranoid as her husband, she still knew that breaking with tradition would never lead anywhere good. The last time they had cut corners, it was to re-route the river away from the new puppet theater, which led to flooding by the stables, causing manure to pour into every crevice on the island.
It was the Week of the Great Bad Smell that Elenzia nearly agreed to leave Pompeii. The writing was already on the wall, and the walls were constantly falling down. That shoddy construction was the work of the Pompeii Building Company, made up of two drunkards and a mule. She knew she should have packed up her family then and hightailed it to a province that wasn’t all about aesthetics. But that night after dinner, as she stopped to catch her breath on her evening run, she stood on a cliffside overlooking the city. That was when she knew she couldn’t go. Come Hades or high feces-filled water, she was there to stay.
Years later, spooked by a different and more dangerous kind of river, her horse took off in the opposite direction of the temple, clearly anticipating that returning home was the right move. Elenzia ran the geography in her head and felt the dread of epiphany overtake her as she deduced, correctly, that her home would be directly in the path of the lava.
As there is no reasoning with a colt, she allowed herself to be carried back to what she knew in her heart would be nothing but ash by the time she arrived there. To think, she and Marco had just put in a new in-ground pool, and the kitchen had been newly renovated after several years of will-we, won’t we, hemming and hawing.
It never sprang to her mind that the damage could involve the loss of human life, let alone the eradication of everything and everyone she knew.
There’s only so much one can handle on their morning commute, and it was reasonable to believe any mess could be tidied up with the right amount of legislation.
Well, anything but traffic.
And that day, it was worse than ever.

Kevin B

Kevin B (they / them) is a writer and poet from New England. Their work has been featured in Esoterica, Molecule, Havik, Qu, and New Plains Review. They are the George Lila Award winner for Short Fiction, and the Featured Queer Poet for Barely Seen (2023).

Headshot: Kevin B

Photo Credit: Staff