Packs of kids roam the streets in colorful costumes, pelting ahead of their parents, swarming the adults on the stoops to grab handfuls of candy, shouting nonsense to each other, trading preferred treats with the cunning and avarice of silk road merchants.
A scrum of them surround me - minions and superheroes and cuties with bearskin and wide, alien eyes - and I do my best to notice all of them, give them their due in both sugar and attention, so as the most recent wave begins to recede, one catches my eye, and I turn to her next.
It takes me a second to register that she’s not, in fact, in any kind of costume, nor is she a kid: her hair is piled in a ratted, single mass of a dread on top of her head, out from under which eyes with white showing entirely around the irises peer, while her black, shapeless dress, fallen off both shoulders, barely contains her heavy breasts that sag beneath.
She smiles, but shakes her head when I offer her candy, and turns to Katie, saying, “I have a daughter who looks like you!”
No comments:
Post a Comment