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By the time Selma hit the street, she was in the grip of a cold self-conscious fear. Bert was showing amazing talent at leatherworking. Given a week to make her a nice leather gift, he'd made this, all while working his two jobs and enrolled full time in soc at UCLA. But when she explained that her childhood in the town of Truth or Consequences, NM, had given her a western sensibility, she could only guess that Bert's lovelorn fingers were warped and deceived by his San Francisco mind into some drag queen mockery of western style. Instead of the braided leather belt with some intricate carving on the back that she'd expected to receive, she was decked out in carved and crenalated and tassled leather, head to toe. Bert had lovingly dressed her, from the 10 gallon leather hat carved with scenes of Native Americans hunting buffalo, to the chaps and spurs. And then, the piece de resistance: the saddlebag. One stirrup was the clasp, and the other hung - it seemed redundant or merely insufficient to suggest decoratively - from the other side. The saddle itself was the lid of the purse, revealing a satin lined two chamber space within. That was what got Selma. The concern involved in sewing in an extra chamber into the purse had moved Bert from overly sappy paramour to slightly creepy potential stalker.

And now, because she had been wholly unprepared for what Bert was doing to her, she had to walk in this getup down to a bus stop and go to a lunch date with a friend. Keeping her head down and putting one foot in front of the other had gotten her to the bus stop, but she realized that she was going to have to sit and wait for the bus. She briefly thought of running back to Bert's: making him take it all back, yelling a bit and running off again. But Bert would most likely not be there when she got back. Why had she ever agreed to walk out in this getup in the first place? The only explanation was shock. He was so broken up with.

She peeked at the world from under her brim. As expected, a crowd of locals was staring at her. Her bench was empty, despite a growing crowd. She was the person at an LA bus stop that no one would sit next to. The bus arrived, and she sat down next to an old lady. The old lady sized her up, and leaned in close.

"Who did this to you, honey?", she whispered.

"Um" she said. "My new boyfriend. About to be ex-boyfriend. Uh, he's from San Francisco, He's a little odd."

The old lady sat back, looking her over again, and nodding very slowly to herself, until almost inperceptively the nod transmogrified into a shake.

"No he ain't" she announced. "He's a space alien."

Could this get any worse? Selma coughed, getting ready to politely refute the lady's claim.

"He is," she went on, "easy to spot their handiwork when you know what to look for."

She looked out the window and back at Selma, leaving no room for rebuttal. "He, or should I say it, is here studying us humans. Mmm uh huh. It'll have several jobs that expose it to humans, and be studying them in some schooling, I figure. That's how they operate. Mmm. And this," here she motioned to Selma's getup, "is like they do, taking a little idea you give them and blowing it up way too much. You think back. It's the way 'he' is about everything, like he just don't quite get humans at all. Once you start looking for them, you see them everywhere. This one is markng you for its own. Means it's thinkin of abducting you."

With that the lady turned abck to the window, her own demons clearly exorcised and passed on to Selma.

She'd had enough. She noticed a used clothing store fly by the bus window, and grabbed the cord. The bus lurched into the stop, and she made her way back. She snuck in as best she could, depositing bits of her outfit over different shelves and racks. She grabbed a blouse and slipped it on unseen and made for the door again. Before she'd even made it out the door she could her a slightly androgenous voice behind her.

"How much is this saddlebag thingy? It's fabulous, but there's no tag on it."