VA Smith

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.

Heading home, bags bulging with sweets, I felt the pirates on us from behind, wrestling the booty from our grip as I kicked, scratched and bit, Stevie brandishing his sword only to see it splintered over the knee of one big kid, the second pushing me to the ground while grabbing the spoils, both hag and hero scrapped, bloody, scared. After they’d left I scrambled to find the hats, hand the gaucho bowler to Zorro, search the dry leaves for my black felt conical, flattened and torn. . . . . .

In high school we’re still secret friends. He carries me through Chemistry, I curate his clothes and hair. Graduation night, I come in Magna to his Summa, later get him high in his neighborhood graveyard, where, stoned dramatic, we swear we will trade hats, Crone to Folk Hero, and back, all our lives.

VA Smith lives in Philadelphia and has published poetry in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them Blue Lake Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Mobius, Quartet, The Southern Review, Verdad, Third Wednesday, Oyster River Pages, and forthcoming in Evening Street Review and West Trade Review, Her book Biking Through the Stone Age will be published by Kelsay Books in Spring 2022. Currently, she’s finishing a collection titled America’s Daughters & Other Poems and ignoring her Peleton.