She rules. This is just a taste of what she can do with a story. These realist tales make a mockery of the ghettoisation of sci-fi as genre. Transcendent realism perhaps, but her distancing devices work to polish the mirror of self-reflection.
First published in The Little Magazine, Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2, 1976. Collected in Orsinian Tales, Harper & Row, 1976, most recently Harper Perennial, 2004
