A Walk in Victoria's Secret by Kate Daniels

Author:Kate Daniels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2010-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

DOGTOWN, 1957

In the piney, pink stria of summer morning skies, we awoke

to the muted, moan-like howling of the hungry redbones

locked in their chain-link compounds. They lived their lives

like that: locked in wire cages until released to hunt, fragmented

images of earlier expeditions flickering in and out of whatever

consciousness they possessed, exciting them to live. Maybe

somewhere in their genetic memories there existed remnant

images of the fleeing slaves their ancestors had pursued north

through the boggy bottoms of the Dismal Swamp to Dogtown,

where freed slaves and poor whites had subsisted for a century,

economically bonded in perpetuity to the gentrified bastards

living north of the river, who valued nothing more than saving

the fabled cobblestones of Monument Avenue from urban renewal.

There, on that broad swath of grassy boulevard, the horsebacked

Confederate generals, deceased in war, cantered statically

through eternity, unaware their dream was dead.

And here in Dogtown, across the river from that genteel boulevard

with its antique mansions and art museums, with its tennis courts

and flower gardens, we didn’t seem to be going anywhere either.

We arose each day and heard the members of our family

clambering past each other for access to the solitary bath

that lacked a tub, our unkempt toenails clicking on the scarred wood floors.

No one spoke, but we could hear the thwonging hiss of my father’s

early morning piss throughout that house, and the foamy scratch

of my uncle’s razor on his chin as he shaved around his cigarette.

Already, the day’s allotment of acrid smoke and malodorous saucers

of stubbed-out butts had begun to mount. The smell stuck in our hair,

in our clothes, turning them rancid. Someone switched on an AM radio.

Someone stirred brown-black granules of instant coffee in a cup of boiling water.

Then, among the ashtrays and the matchbooks on the table top,

we poured out bowls of cold cereal from paper boxes, and fell into them,

lapping the milk like famished creatures. Outside, the other

creatures shook the fencing of their pens, hurling themselves

full-length on the chain link walls while we screamed at them

to hush. But they were dogs, and knew no better. Undeterred

by our demand for silence, they went on howling, mindlessly, inside their cages.

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