Baby Cat-Face

by Barry Gifford

Shocked and confused by the violence and craziness of everyday life, Esquerita Reyna, also known as Baby Cat-Face, is ill-prepared for the modern world. Living in the shadow world of New Orleans, taking spooky side trips to Mississippi and North Carolina, she struggles with the specters of love, fundamentalist religion, and extra-terrestrial activity, to name just a few. After being hijacked with a busful of other passengers and forced to watch a peculiar avant-garde dance about insects, Baby Cat-Face gives it all up and joins Mother Bizco's Temple of the Few Washed Pure by Her Blood. Her membership is jeopardized, though, when a moment of unheavenly forgetfulness entangles her with one Waldo Orchid, a grossly fat young man who has a weakness for obscure poetry during sex. The fate of Baby's unborn child is no more reassuring than hers, and his daughter's only inheritance will be the book her mother wrote: Great Women I Have Heard About But Never Met.