Handbag Merchant

The bow legged man’s mother wore hats, sunbonnets and pillboxes, and a beret with a cameo pinned to the façade. She had bucked teeth and an under-bite and never wore the same hat twice, for fear of being ostentatious, or simply because she didn’t want to look like she had only one hat. The shamble leg man suspected that the whore’s glove he found belonged to the bow legged man’s mother, though he couldn’t prove it, nor really cared to, as he cared for very little. He rigged the whore’s glove from the bedpost over his bed with a straightened coat hanger and stared at it for hours on end, sometimes longer. He imagined it covering a whore’s tiny hand, the fingers clutching a handbag or a silk hat, the kind worn by French chanteuse and magician’s assistants. He masturbated into his hat, pretending he was a magician or a handbag merchant, his face redder than a fresh picked apple, snorting and chortling like a Brahman.