The fro-yo place put out a screen and was playing some sort of Pixar movie. Maisie stole my ZZ Packer book because I showed her the first sentence of “Brownies” (“By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909”). The sun was shining directly on the screen, blotting out most of the picture, but at one point, the Pixar girl was playing a violin while (?)standing on rooftops(?), something minor key and mournful, in its way brutal. In real life, a little real girl stood on her mother’s lap at the next table, her feet digging right into her mother’s thighs, staring at the screen and asking, about the violin playing cartoon girl, “why is she sad? why is she sad?” I noticed that the real girl was brown, her hair braided in bumps. Her mother was white, nondescript in the way we mothers of a certain age become. Maisie licked bloody raspberry fro-yo off her spoon and read on.
Fiction - ISSUE #28