Stella, Gone
ONE MORNING ON West Lime Street, at the southernmost end of Ironwood’s city limits nearest the border of Michigan and Wisconsin, Stella Draper woke up and realized she was suddenly thirty-three years old. This being the alleged age that Jesus Christ died, she took her father’s antique Colt .45 and sat in front of the eleven jars of skin creams that she’d bought from Gibson’s Pamida and McLellan’s. She arranged these potions carefully in front of her vanity mirror where she’d spend hours camouflaging the five moles on her face so they would never appear as bumps. She placed the g*n’s muzzle on her tongue and pulled the trigger.
Of course, the Ironwood Daily Globe never reported on any of this; only that she’d died by her own hand. The date was June 3, 1977.
I WAS TEN years o
