Light the fuse

Not the great New Zealand mobilisation novel

An early work-in-progress dedicated to helping,
circuitously, precipitate the Great Mobilisation

Dare to be wise!
Kant

Author ’s note

By His Real Name: Whether the use of Salvatore Cimino as a pseudonym is widespread in Sicily, or not, is unknown to me. Its inclusion in evidence given against the Sicilian mafia, as reported by The Guardian, is altogether too tantalising to not gratuitously include here, in this note concerning the possibly all-too-confusing fictional /nonfictional uses of the name Cimino, in and around this story. image Te Papa Tongarewa

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240717
updated 20251130

Once, while for reasons of security I was hiding in the flat opposite mine, I saw Salvatore Cimino [not his real namebrackets as published by The Guardian] and three others coming up the stairs, Cimino was carrying a grey Magnum .357 pistol.
Davide De Marchi

Salvatore, was the given name of my mother’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He, however—Salvatore Michele Saverio Cimino, born on Capri—was not the son-of-a-Salvatore, but of the third son of a naval captain, Michele Cimino, and his wife, Anna Soldano.

In my first attempt to commence this proto near-future novel, I used Salvatore, rather than Cimino, to refer to myself in both the autobiographical chapters and those deploying other forms, such as the future-counterfactualif indeed future-counterfactual is, or could be, a valid term!. However, I was also using pseudonyms for the other characters, which, in this iteration, I am endeavouring to avoid. It is entirely possible that I will revert to using Salvatore. Meantime, given the maniacal urgency of this unabashedly megalomaniacal endeavour, when picking up the project again in 2025, I persevered with Cimino and the third-person account, trusting that the way forward would reveal itself. It did, but not until the tail end of November, as enormity of the necessity of my Sarah and I hastily assuming new identities, and our new reality, finally sank in.

Uninvited predations by two fellow humans—one with familial connections and the other with geographic—necessitated our relocation to “somewhere in the South Island”. Sarah, a Mainlandera native of the larger, less populous of New Zealand’s two largest islands, had given me her best 50 years in my Mahurangi mudpuddle; now it was her turn. Of the many upsides of the seismic upheaval, I belatedly realised, was that I had long since been handed a more-than-adequate excuse to persevere with the third-person Cimino…
To be continued…

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Disclosure The author of this novel modello is no longer the secretary of Mahurangi Action Incorporated or the Mahurangi Coastal Path Trust. The content published here, however, is that of the editorially independent, independently funded Mahurangi Magazine.