sHORT pANTS*

Mr. Dolores wore a woman’s corset and short trousers with bell-cuffs hemmed at the bottoms. He wore a hat with a hatband with a wren’s foot cameo and a tortoise shell clasp with a mohair snap. His choice of footwear was negligible, as he chose turquoise pumps with flat heels and whalebone button-ups, as he felt that eyelets and laces were gauche and farfetched. His wife, Adele Dolores, a decorous and well-appointed woman with soupcon tastes and little patience for her husband’s chicanery, wore lambs’ wool halters and taffeta wrap-around skirts worsted at the waist and girded with an eye for symmetry and good manners. They died in they’re sleep watching a rerun of I Love Lucy, the lights off, the window grout with undergarments, Mr. Dolores in a woman’s corset, short pants and a hat.