Salty Beans, Chapter 5.2

"But Clarissa's guess was wrong"

But Clarissa’s guess was wrong. The voice belonged to a rather glowing white woman, age around 35 would have been Clarissa’s next guess, and she looked just the way Clarissa thought a poet should look: a vision in beige, organized and put together, as if she had come from a business meeting followed by a therapeutic massage. The woman, a tall woman, posed in the doorway, wearing a floppy beige hat, and Clarissa could think of no reason to dawdle with preliminaries or ask her to come in and sit down. She seemed like a woman at ease in a doorway. Between two worlds! She did not even offer her name, which Clarissa assumed was something like Angel Glory.

“Do you have a sample of your work?” Clarissa asked.

“I can tell you one. Here it comes. ‘I used to say poems in my uncle’s house. I told him he was a big fat mouse. How the other children did cavort... To hear me make such merry sport.’ That’s it. I won’t lie to you, I made it up just now. It’s the first poem I ever wrote, and now I’ve already forgotten it,” she said with her big, beautiful, crooked, gleaming, unsmiling teeth.

“It shows signs of promise!”

“I’ll be frank,” said the woman. “I love murder and everything about murder.”