Stickers

by Pravasan Pillay

Alison owned the largest private collection of stickers in South Africa and stored it in one room of her two room flat. Initially, she purchased the stickers strictly for use in her diary, but a sheet of glittery smiling bananas discovered at a Pick-n-Pay convinced her that certain stickers were not meant to have their beauty fixed in one place for all time. So Alison began keeping stickers too special to be stuck in a shoebox, and when the shoebox began to spill over, a shelf, then shelves. Occasionally, she would nearly be overcome by the urge to use a sticker from her collection but would quickly suppress it by affixing a band-aid on her diary. Her psychiatrist called her use of band-aids "significant." When Alison later recalled this observation to her mother, it prompted the following, uncharacteristic, exclamation from the sixty-eight year old woman: "No shit!"

6S

Pravasan Pillay lives in Durban, South Africa and runs the indie press Tearoom Books.