Love's Baby Soft
| LOVE'S BABY SOFT Anthologized in AQR's One Blood: The Narrative Impulse |
VIEW PDF AND READ THE STORY "My grandmother says bend down, and the misery in her voice makes me lean down just a little. I can smell it, the stale odor of Sarah's cologne. I put a little there each day, my grandmother says, indicating the carpeting, just a few drops where she spilled it the day she died, to remind me of her. And taking my wrist she rubs on it some liquid from the bottle, draws the neck of the bottle across my throat. Don't that smell good, she asks. I look at myself in the mirror and my hair looks greenish, my skin mottled with dusky blotches of mildew. My grandmother says, don't it make you look real different." AUTHOR'S NOTE: The eponymous 1970s perfume was startlingly atrocious. I remember seeing the box on my aunt's dresser, and being very concerned that adults would want to be like babies. And then of course I smelled it, and that brought on a powerful sense of dread, as though something pitiable happened to adults that would make them want to smell like that...or fall in love with someone who smelled like that. However, these horrors paled in comparison to various of my Southern grandmother's folk beliefs - especially the one suggesting that ghosts will enter your mouth while you sleep unless you do something drastic to keep it closed. - QAW |
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