Little Miss Knight, on a sunny day, found herself to be the unexpected possessor of 25 euros. It seemed to her a very large sum of money, and the question of investment was one that puzzled her greatly. She walked about in an apparent dreamy state for a few days, deeply absorbed in speculation and calculation. She did not wish to act hastily, to do anything she might regret afterwards.
“Do you want to know a secret?” she asked. “I thought this might be my wedding dress.”
Little Miss Knight stands in my bedroom a few months later, wearing a dress which is half-unzipped, revealing tanned limbs from a summer coated in a slick of oil laying out in the sun. The dress was the colour of warm vanilla, the shade white vintage dresses sometimes turn after many years of being unprotected. She hung the dress in the back of her closet but she was wearing it now. So I guess she already knew that it wasn’t going to be her wedding dress and it wasn’t going to be that guy. She kept the dress safe, all 10 euros of it — which was bought with the best of intentions. It just didn’t work out. It wasn’t the dress’ fault.
Little Miss Knight lives in a dark green sundress. It was her favourite dress of that summer, someone’s from the ‘90s, and she lived in it. She paid 4 euros for it at the thrift shop and wore it once or twice a week. It was the night that you said, “I’m moving to New York.” She stood crying in the street and never wore it again, balled it up, hid it in a drawer until she felt strong enough to throw it away. She slammed the dumpster lid on it, it was tainted. She still thinks about it sometimes, and about the black turtleneck dress she was wearing when a different boy told her that he didn’t love her. She slept in that dress that night, a wreck of vodka diluted with soda and cigarettes. She passed on its bad karma to another thrift shop.
Little Miss Knight spent all her fortune on different dresses, she couldn’t help it. She even bought her first wedding dress! She bought innocent sweet vintage prairie girl dresses, sequinned slip dresses, dresses that are little more than two pieces of silk. She knows you didn’t forget that dress, the one she wore to the wedding where it clung so slightly from the heat, the one you undid so carefully, the one that wilts now in your closet, still sticky with a few summers’ worth of sweat.
Little Miss Knight has been hiding, shivered up in the brunt of the winter, still using her clothes as protection, as armour. She hid in dirty leggings and sweatshirts, had no desire to dress up, look pretty and parade around. She bought shirts much too big, wore her brother’s sweatpants and socks. She came to realise that summer was over, and that the music ceased. She got into her broken down Beetle, and felt like a dream came to an end. You study her small, pale face and see nothing. Unless you somehow seem to detect a poignant wish; that her yellow Beetle would never stop anywhere, and go on with her forever.