BIT - claudia smith

BIT

claudia smith

They leave with a doll from Wal-Mart, hypoallergenic, safe for babies, nine dollars and eighty four cents, and a Spiderman costume for fourteen eighty eight, after payday, after Xmas, so they won’t arrive with nothing to give. A five dollar markdown green Power Ranger. In the back of the Ford Escape is an only child, clutching his favorite Lego, the one he named Cesar Chavez. It is winter but she drives windows down. She passes white windmills scattered across the ranch land. They remind her of teeth. It is a bearable level of sadness. She is hoping, for her son, nothing worse than things that maim but do not kill; a mugging or a nasty boss or a disease that can be fought and most likely cured, a loss of health insurance, a divorce, the death of a single loved one. Just something ordinary, an ordinary amount of sadness, and please only occasionally. Pulling out of the city after burgers, the ice sky hurts her eyes. She imagines tearing into it the way she chomped into her burger a couple hours back. The clouds would not taste like cotton or cotton candy but something else, something only the gods could eat.



Claudia Smith
http://www.claudiaweb.net/
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote