Aliens of Affection: Stories

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ON HER WAY TO the grocery store, to which she could walk, in celebration of which she often wore lizard-skin cowboy boots and other dress excessive for a daily trip to buy food for a family, Mrs. Hollingsworth recited, “It loves me, it loves me not. I love it, I love it not—” until she was interrupted by a child behind a picket fence next to the sidewalk.

“What are you talking about, lady?” This came equably from a round freckled face just above the sharpened pickets, all of which suggested briefly an uncarved, unlit pumpkin speaking to her.

“The South,” Mrs. Hollingsworth said to the pumpkin face, which she presumed, not altogether comfortably, a portrait of innocence. The child was in fact a portrait of insolence and had wanted to say not “What are you talking about, lady?” but “Hey, lady, how about some pussy?” He had watched her for weeks walk in costumes to and from the store and he had prodigious twelve-year-old need.

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