What I love about this short story is this whole short story. But also – the fact that Kincaid never once uses the word girl in the text, except for the title, and also that we can see past this list of instructions to touch the outline of the relationship between the two main characters – the speaker and the listener. Everyone should read everything by Kincaid.
First published in The New Yorker, June 26, 1978. Collected in At The Bottom Of The River, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. Read it online here
A Personal Anthology 