Time is rarely kind. Give it time, they say, and time is a healer, but it is worse than that. We are all of us undone by time, eventually we are. And Missy Dee is a fitting example of this.
Missy Dee and I remember her, years back, so many I was knee high to a duck and Missy Dee was a girl two years ahead of me in school. I think I loved her back then, wanted her to notice me and to hold my name in her mouth. I was just a kid, turning cartwheels across the grass in front of the school, just where Missy Dee could see me if she looked. And she was as pretty as flowers or peaches or kittens in a basket.
I heard stories about her back then. Stories from boys I looked up to. Stories of kisses in Hewie’s garage with the door lowered and shut and music playing. Missy Dee charged the boys even then. A dollar a kiss she charged and a dollar fifty if the kiss was with tongues. And some of the boys took money from the purses or wallets of their parents, enough for ten kisses sometimes, and Missy Dee was worth every stolen cent.
My first kiss was a dollar kiss from Missy Dee and it was warm and wet and sweet as strawberries. And it was everything those boys said it would be. And I dared to put one hand on her tits, just laid there. She broke away and she said that’d cost extra if I was to do that. I only had enough for the kiss.
Years after that I saw Missy Dee in bars and she was stroking the cheek of some guy with money in his pockets and she was pretty even then. She came up to me one time and she said she remembered me and she remembered my hand on her tit and she said I still owed her for that. I gave her everything I had and we went back to her apartment and made out. I knew what she was and I knew it was a money-fuck, but it felt like something more.
And like I said before, time undoes us all in the end. Missy Dee is old now and I am old, too. She don’t turn heads like she used and everything about her is grey and heavy and sag. I see her sometimes and she’s sitting in the sun and smoking a cigarette and trying to look glamorous. I look at her hard, trying to see the girl in her, trying to see what I saw before. She says she remembers me and she smiles and pats the space beside her on the grass. I make a gesture to show my pockets are empty and she says that don’t matter none, so I sit and we chew the fat and talk of how things used to be.
Missy Dee and she says how she wishes she could turn back time, and she says she’d go all the way back to that dollar kiss in Hewie’s garage and my hand on her tits and she’d hold that moment just for the look on my face – ‘like you was blessed and in Heaven’. I laugh and I tell her I remember.
She takes my hand and puts it there, where it was in that dollar-kiss moment, and she says this one’s for free. And in another time it would have been different, but Missy Dee is old now and I am old too and touching her tit, heavy and warm, I don’t feel a thing and that’s the unkindness of time and the undoing of all those years.
Patricia Ann McNair 
Time is rarely kind. Give it time, they say, and time is a healer, but it is worse than that. We are all of us undone by time, eventually we are. And Missy Dee is a fitting example of this.
Missy Dee and I remember her, years back, so many I was knee high to a duck and Missy Dee was a girl two years ahead of me in school. I think I loved her back then, wanted her to notice me and to hold my name in her mouth. I was just a kid, turning cartwheels across the grass in front of the school, just where Missy Dee could see me if she looked. And she was as pretty as flowers or peaches or kittens in a basket.
I heard stories about her back then. Stories from boys I looked up to. Stories of kisses in Hewie’s garage with the door lowered and shut and music playing. Missy Dee charged the boys even then. A dollar a kiss she charged and a dollar fifty if the kiss was with tongues. And some of the boys took money from the purses or wallets of their parents, enough for ten kisses sometimes, and Missy Dee was worth every stolen cent.
My first kiss was a dollar kiss from Missy Dee and it was warm and wet and sweet as strawberries. And it was everything those boys said it would be. And I dared to put one hand on her tits, just laid there. She broke away and she said that’d cost extra if I was to do that. I only had enough for the kiss.
Years after that I saw Missy Dee in bars and she was stroking the cheek of some guy with money in his pockets and she was pretty even then. She came up to me one time and she said she remembered me and she remembered my hand on her tit and she said I still owed her for that. I gave her everything I had and we went back to her apartment and made out. I knew what she was and I knew it was a money-fuck, but it felt like something more.
And like I said before, time undoes us all in the end. Missy Dee is old now and I am old, too. She don’t turn heads like she used and everything about her is grey and heavy and sag. I see her sometimes and she’s sitting in the sun and smoking a cigarette and trying to look glamorous. I look at her hard, trying to see the girl in her, trying to see what I saw before. She says she remembers me and she smiles and pats the space beside her on the grass. I make a gesture to show my pockets are empty and she says that don’t matter none, so I sit and we chew the fat and talk of how things used to be.
Missy Dee and she says how she wishes she could turn back time, and she says she’d go all the way back to that dollar kiss in Hewie’s garage and my hand on her tits and she’d hold that moment just for the look on my face – ‘like you was blessed and in Heaven’. I laugh and I tell her I remember.
She takes my hand and puts it there, where it was in that dollar-kiss moment, and she says this one’s for free. And in another time it would have been different, but Missy Dee is old now and I am old too and touching her tit, heavy and warm, I don’t feel a thing and that’s the unkindness of time and the undoing of all those years.