"Alone" by Paolo Alberti (ed) (Giraldi Editore, 2019)

18 stories by Paolo Alberti, Gianluca Morozzi, Stefano Mellini, Leonardo Vicari, Piero Mariella

"alone" in Italian means "halo", an apt coincidence, as the back cover notes.

• "Han Solo!" recounts activity in a computer game - Han Solo vs Deus - for 6 pages, then shows us at the end that the 2 players are a boy whose mother discourages computer games, and an illegal immigrant, a 10 y.o. Chinese boy who told the psychologist he wanted to be called Han.
• "All those yesterdays" refers to several songs including Pearl Jam's "Alone".
• In "Sisifo Meccanico" a robot continues visiting his masters' house not realising they're dead. There may be no-one else alive. The robot then dies.
• In "Isolamento Amniotico" a fetus comes to consciousness, wondering if it already knows all it needs to. It's late. The mother doesn't know the baby's gender.
• In "2 Agosto 1980" Marisa (recently divorced, working in an autogrill) feels lonely though she's with a crowd. Paride (recently divorced from Marisa is a bus driver. His bus is divered to help with the Bologna massacre. Their son Tommaso is with his grandmother. She says that when she feels angry she hammers nails into wood. When Paride collects him, he's hammered in as much nails as victims of the massacre.