Tipton Poetry Journal – Winter 2022
To Be Zorro VA Smith Child of a prefab ranch house, of a Woman’s Day mom, I lacked, at 7, intimacy with the gothic, though I still knew that a lonely Victorian on a hill facing a cemetery was out of my league. What landed me here, in part, was my ministry to grade school outcasts, bound to bring them to the safe center where taunts about being poor, smelly, an eater of nose matter, wearer of torn clothes might end. Stevie Jones was such a rescue. More than that, small, quiet, brainy, he was, by some as yet invisible metric, a boy from the right kind of people, my mother declared: shabby genteel Southerners transplanted to our hard scrabble town, where his grandmother and mine played bridge, garden clubbed, attended Episcopal Trinity together, recalcitrant ladies among the bubbas. So there I stood on All Hallow’s Eve, as Stevie’s librarian mother called it, ready for Trick or Treat. Though I’d declined candy cream pumpkins collecting cat hair on Stevie’s bedside table, I worked my pony-tailed best at bounciness, looking eager to fill my sack with sugary bribes. Into the night we went, good girl turned wicked witch, gentle boy aching to be Zorro.
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