I went to a garage sale yesterday, following the big black arrow on a cardboard sign. I pulled up to the curb across the street. The place was a dump, loose shingles half stripped and falling into a clogged gutter.
I walked up the driveway and waved at a skinny woman with bad teeth and giant hoop earrings. She stopped what she was doing immediately and ran to me, pushing a baby carriage through the kitsch cluttering the cracked asphalt.
‘I’ll give her to you for thirty dollars, twenty five if you take her little brother,’ she said, dirty fingernails pointing to another carriage ten feet away. ‘What’d you say? The carriage is fine, too. Brass – these are just smudges, nothing a little Windex won’t fix.’
I bent over and lifted the blanket off of the baby’s face. Its cheeks were sunken like wet paper and its eyes were hollow, thumbtack pupils in a sea of white. Dirt and baby food looked spackled onto its face.
‘Oh hey, that stuff is just a smudge, too, nothing Windex can’t fix. Hey, come here, I’ll clean it off for you right now!’
I would have looked, but I was already in my car, the radio turned on full blast and the windows rolled up tight. |
