are there others who would rather be where i am alone?

"My foot!" Hattie Mae screamed. "Get it off my foot!" When the preacher lifted the swing away, Hattie Mae grabbed her ankle. "Tell me just what you two were doing out here?" her mother asked. "Lord knows, I've tried to live a respectable life, but now I guess it's all over. Hard telling what the neighbors must think." The preacher straightened his clothes. A wad of hair stood up in a rooster's comb at the back of his head. Hattie Mae rubbed her ankle and stared at the patch of unruly hair. "We must have been too much for it," the preacher said. "AU that weight pulled it loose. But don't you worry, Mrs. Jenkins, I'll see that it's fixed." "AU this time you been coming here, it's been on account of my Hattie Mae, ain't it? I should have seen through you a long time ago." "I'm afraid you've got the wrong idea." Hattie Mae leaned back on her palms and flipped her injured foot back and forth, trying to wear away the pain. Her dress creeped up over her knees, but she didn't bother to pull it down. "Don't blame him, Momma," she said. "You let him alone." Neither of them looked at her. "Get up from there, Hattie, and quit going on over nothing." Her mother raked her cane through the shards of the extract bottle. "You ain't hurt." Hattie Mae lifted one hand toward the preacher's back. With her other hand she pushed down against the broken swing for support. "I think you better go," her mother said. "You've done enough for one day." "Yes," he said. "Yes, I'd better." As he ran down the steps, Hattie Mae called after him. "But don't you worry. No harm's done. You come back, you hear? I think I'm about ready to be converted." Her mother pulled dead leaves off the geranium and dropped them over the porch railing into the yard. The mingling scent from the bruised stems and the vanilla extract reminded Hattie Mae of the smell of the preacher's lap. She watched the leaves flutter to the ground. Falling into the preacher's lap was the closest she'd ever been to a man before. are there others who would rather be where i am alone? i walk over many english poets and beside some royal corpses and i wonder if they wondered about being great and famous and dead next to their enemies all clumped together and labeled in stone in ohio it is eighty degrees but in the abbey it is always sixty-five the Italian vendors don't believe me when i tell them i live someplace where the sun really shines in the summer lots of common living people pay money to walk around these famous dead ones just to take pictures that prove what a stupid thing they did when the graves in ohio are prettier than these all the flowers in the sun out at the leatherwood cemetery are brought by those who have read aunt dorothy's poems and know about great-grandma's royal blood —Jeanette Cox 62 ...