Post by Deleted on Aug 29, 2013 3:57:41 GMT -5
I cannot say how I ended up this way. It seems trite to try and blame someone - my parents, "society," or God. Especially not that last one, as I'm pretty ambivalent to the idea. It is true my father was a coward and my mother a whore - no, I am not bad-mouthing her, I am using that term literally and not pejoratively. It is true that the human race is largely a selfish, autophagus blight on this pristine, emerald marble, despite our best efforts to pretend the contrary. It is true that, if there were a God, it would be capricious, disinterested, or wicked - neither one the sort of trait you'd want in the Creator of the Universe.
But none of these account for how I became the way I am. A lesser person might say they do, but I vehemently refuse. I am not a decent woman - certainly not a "good" one - but even being the despicable waif I am, I refuse, absolutely refuse, to let someone else take the blame for who I am. Liar. Thief. Whore. Killer.
Again, I am not using any of these words pejoratively, and I have never been one for dramatics. Merely objective statements about who I am. What I am. I derive no joy from doing any of these things. I am merely eking out my existence as best I can. Just like everyone else, though my "sorrow-footprint" is, like my carbon-footprint, pretty miniscule when compared to the businessman in the suit, the prostitute-killer (the only demographic I've ever killed, personally, and oft in self-defense), the president, the terrorist.
I rarely feel bad for my actions, but I did feel a tinge of guilt as I turned back and looked at the young girl. She was maybe fifteen, sixteen. Pretty, in that awkward sort of way girls are when they're no longer strictly "girls" but aren't quite women. She was with her friends - it could had been any one of them - but she was walking on the left side of the group, and she had been the one in my pickpocket range. I had bumped into her, so many times. Her friends had rolled their eyes at me. "Gross, homeless skank," their glares said, though their mouths just curled in wry smiles. My mark, with the pretty blonde braid running from the side of her head, down her shoulder and resting on her chest, put her hands on my shoulders, as if to catch me. Bad move on her part - it only made my sneak-thiefing easier. "I'm so sorry!" she cried. It had sounded like she meant it - I'm a good judge of sincerity. Was that why I felt so terribly right now?
It had been all to easy to swipe her wallet. As I stared back at her, I frowned. I had definitely ruined her day, I'm sure. No shopping or movies or whatever their plans were for her. Unless her friends spotted her. Thinking back on their raccoon-eye makeup jobs and piercing stares, I doubted it. Her parents would be angry.
But she would survive. I had.
"Hey, that girl took my wallet," came Blonde Sidebraid's voice. I had been staring back at her while drifting along in my absent-minded reverie, like some kind of chump who just got kicked out of his parents' house and thought himself a hood-rat. "Damnit, Jo, you're better than this," I whispered under my breath as I turned and began to walk, fast.
Sidebraid wasn't having it. "Hey! Hey you! I think you have my wallet!" I put my head down, staring down my long legs, eyes tracing the patterns on my pink fishnet leggings to my black combat boots, past those at the concrete squares that made up the sidewalk. I watched each line pass. One. Two. Three. "Hey!" Four. Five. Six. "She took my wallet!"
An arm - hairy and veiny and male - reached out to grab me, and my lightning-fast hand shot out and gripped it like a thrusting cobra. I bent the fingers back in one fluid motion, and it pulled away in recoil.
"Stop, miss!" came another voice. "Hey you!" And Sidebraid, crying out, "Please, come back!"
It was no longer worth it, I pulled the wallet from the inside pocket in my khaki green jacket, and threw it up in the air. Then, I bolted. Sidebraid's parents wouldn't be mad, after all. But I'd still be hungry unless I found another mark or turned a trick. The first, finding another mark, would be near impossible, it was 6 in the evening. People would be more wary. The criminally-inclined, and there were many of us in this city, would be more likely to smash a raggedy-looking, 5 foot 1 streetkid's head in for trying. The second, selling myself, didn't appeal to me, either, though I had done it many a time.
I said before that my actions never made me feel bad. I did what I had to to survive. To eak out a living. My "daily bread" as the Christian tracts that my mother kept on the back of our toilet read. But I lied. Prostitution makes me feel horrible. To the pit of my stomach.
No, not for me. I'm not that delicate. I know I am spoiled goods. The offspring of a scared, abused little girl who had grown, only physically and in no other way, into a woman and the abusive, alcoholic animal that had reminded her of her own father so much that she had clung to him. I am Jo Jeffries, the daughter of Tamara and Lee. I understand and accept who and what I am. I have ascended beyond simple things like pride or self-esteem. I have been molded, in the crucible that was my childhood, into a higher form of being. No, I don't feel horrible for me. But for the men.
First of all, the idea of paying for sex in one of the most sexually-liberated eras of human history is just odd, to me. I feel like selling ice to an Eskimo when I get picked up by a man. Virgins are rarer than unicorns these days, and monogamy, while not completely extinct, seems to be pretty temporary among everyone between the ages of 13 and 69.
Secondly, they all tell me they love me. I told you before that I am a good judge of sincerity. It's like my superpower, my one inherent talent. I don't think I've ever been successfully lied to. And let me tell you, many of these men mean it, which hurts. The gesture I show them is so miniscule, so selfish, so impersonal, and they fall in love with me. How hurting, how horribly damaged does one have to be for a financial transaction to make them "fall in love"? And the few that don't mean it when they say it? Those are worse. Their eyes are dead, like corpses. It isn't just me they tell they love and don't, I know. It's their families. Their friends. Sports. Books.
I have no love for people, of course. A bit of empathy, I suppose, but no love or admiration. I do love things, though. Fantasy novels, or novels of any kind. Hot dogs. Dogs. Oolong tea. Baseball. Watermelon. I love babies, untainted yet by their own human nature, or so oblivious that it doesn't matter. Trees. Snow. Writing. I love many things. These men though, love nothing.
Those are the clientele of a prostitute - let no one ever tell you different. Men so broken that they'll love anything, or so broken that they can love nothing. It kills me to be around these men. Yet as I turned the street and passed a young, professional-looking couple with hot, doggie-bagged Tiki Masala in hand exiting a restaurant, I realized my hunger pangs might kill me just as dead. I turned down the alley-way. 6:25. They might be throwing out leftovers at this time - cancelled take-out orders by couples who didn't communicate their dinner plans. The pickings of suburban kids whose parents were trying to show them a little culture. I traipsed down the alley way, the thought of coriander and sorta-still-warm naan tickling my tongue.
There was no dumpster on the left side of the building, but I saw that the alley made a right-angled turn to the right, down behind the building. It must be there. I hurried along, my hopes naively rising despite my years of experience living on the streets. The dumpster lay before me, against the back wall of the Taj Mahal. Big and blue, standing there like the Ark of the Covenant, and inside I would find manna from the heavens. I flung it open, and a rat scattered. I tore open the only black garbage bag in there with the fury of ten thousand wolverines.
Shitty diapers.
Most people would curse, but I hadn't cursed in years. Since I left home to come to the city. I am not opposed to it, nor am I offended by people who choose to. I just feel like I should save them, in case I ever need them again. The f-word, I feel especially, is like fine china of expressing yourself. I'm not going to get it out over some BBQ potato salad with the Johnson's. I will save it, for when the Emperor of Japan brings me sushi.
Hungry, exhasted, and kicking myself in the rear for messing up my pickpocket job, I slumped down beside the dumpster, laying in the lee it formed with the wall running perpendicular to it. My tummy growled angrily at my surrender. "Unless you have any ideas," I murmured to it, and sleep took me almost immediately.
* * *
I awoke what seemed like immediately, the sobbing of my mother echoing in my ears as my dreams faded back into my subconscious. I gazed up at the stars, twinkling like so many diamonds in the night sky. I'm not being poetic. Did you know that diamonds aren't actually rare at all? Their scarcity is a conspiracy made by money-hungry diamond companies - so is giving them to women. Prior to a broad advertising campaign, aimed at men, women scarcely wore diamonds. They aren't very pretty. If I was romantically-inclined, I'd think I'd want a ruby or a pearl in my ring. Though, right now, I'd rather onion rings.
I rubbed my eyes and looked at my watch. It was June and dark, and so it must be after 9. 9:15 said my pocket watch as I produced it from the inside pocket of my khaki jacket and flicked it open. Lifted from a client. Some sort of professory-looking dude. I loved it. He was one of the ones who meant it when he said he loved me, if you're wondering.
As I arose to my feet, my knees shook like some sort of infant bovid taking its first steps. Holy, was I ever hungry. Biting my lip, I took a quick inventory of when I had last eaten. Day or two ago, I thought. I had used the last bit of my money and bought make-up like a short-sighted idiot. Hey, I know that you probably, by now, think that I'm quite weird... but every girl likes to get some new make-up. In this, I'm no exception.
I am quite naturally pretty - the universe is too chaotic for me not to be. My father was devilishly handsome, my mother, the epitome of a southern belle. If they were ugly as well as tremendously-screwed up, it would be too fishy. The universe, or God or fate or whatever, would draw too much attention to itself. So, my family was low-born, dysfunctional, violent, uneducated. But we looked alright.
Knees still knocking together like a starving African child about to drop (ok, that one was bad), I began to sort of hobble down the alleyway. I was positively ravenous now. I figured I'd head down to the corner of Claymore and Rosalia. A dimly lit area, with a Lebanese-owned pizza shop on the way, it was a gathering area for whores, johns, and pimps. It was almost quaint in its stereotypical look. Like a bunch of black youths holding a boombox and looking menacing while their vehicle bounces on hydraulic pumps - you wouldn't think it actually ever existed unless you saw it. But, I swear, it was there. At the very least, maybe some of the less feral whores would buy me a slice and a can of coke.
Hookers, other than me, were mostly two breeds. Matronly, with a lot of love in their heart, or wild she-jackals that would go off on you if you so much looked at then wrong. Primarily, I kicked it with the former.
Old Linda might have some change to spare.
As I took another step, down through the alley, my combat boot made a weird, gushing sound. My eyes shot down almost immediately. You can step on some nasty stuff in this city. I once planted my foot in human excrement.
This time, though, it was blood. Thick, viscous blood, shimmering black in the moonlight. It was pooling in an indentation in the pavement on the alley floor, flowing from down in the darkness. I flicked my butterfly knife opened.
"Hello?" I cried out in the darkness. I almost kicked myself for being that girl. I had seen my fair share of horror flicks, and I always laughed at those broads. Like the killer is going to pipe up, "Hey there, nice weather we're having." Damn it, Jo. I guess the impulse is universal. I walked forward, really wishing I had eaten something. I didn't want to have to scrap with some gangbangers while feeling so frail.
She lay there, barely illuminated. Beautiful, in an eerie way. Her dress was white, with yellow daisies dancing on it, almost as if they were real, in a field somewhere down South, swaying in the wind, stretching toward as if begging Sol Invicta to pick them up in her loving arms and reward them with a kiss on the face. It was too finely made for her to be a whore, too new.
Her face had been smashed in. No, not smashed. Caved in. I am not squeamish, but it was too much for even my lizard-brain to process. I hurled involuntarily. Less than a mouthful of bile came up, and my stomach contracted so badly that even the worst period I had ever had felt like a tummy-rub. Still, curiosity had me. Or a sense of duty. Something. I spit what little liquid - I cannot truly call it vomit - that was in my mouth behind me, and tip-toed forward. Her foot had been hacked off. Just the right one, and the flat that had once been on it was gone, though its partner still was on her left foot. Our killer had a foot-fetish, perhaps?
She was petite. She was maybe fifteen, sixteen. Pretty, in that awkward sort of way girls are when they're no longer strictly "girls" but aren't quite women. A pretty blonde braid was on the side of her head, descending over her shoulder and across her bosom, which had been exposed by a rip in her dress.
Blonde Sidebraid. My mark from earlier.
I did something that I hadn't done since I had left my childhood home, my crucible, the cocoon from which I had emerged a new, higher being. I fell down onto my knees, crawled like a wounded animal over to the little doe with the smashed-in face and stolen foot, and curled up next to her body, her coagulating blood sticking to my coat and leaking through, cold, onto my skin.
And I cried.
But none of these account for how I became the way I am. A lesser person might say they do, but I vehemently refuse. I am not a decent woman - certainly not a "good" one - but even being the despicable waif I am, I refuse, absolutely refuse, to let someone else take the blame for who I am. Liar. Thief. Whore. Killer.
Again, I am not using any of these words pejoratively, and I have never been one for dramatics. Merely objective statements about who I am. What I am. I derive no joy from doing any of these things. I am merely eking out my existence as best I can. Just like everyone else, though my "sorrow-footprint" is, like my carbon-footprint, pretty miniscule when compared to the businessman in the suit, the prostitute-killer (the only demographic I've ever killed, personally, and oft in self-defense), the president, the terrorist.
I rarely feel bad for my actions, but I did feel a tinge of guilt as I turned back and looked at the young girl. She was maybe fifteen, sixteen. Pretty, in that awkward sort of way girls are when they're no longer strictly "girls" but aren't quite women. She was with her friends - it could had been any one of them - but she was walking on the left side of the group, and she had been the one in my pickpocket range. I had bumped into her, so many times. Her friends had rolled their eyes at me. "Gross, homeless skank," their glares said, though their mouths just curled in wry smiles. My mark, with the pretty blonde braid running from the side of her head, down her shoulder and resting on her chest, put her hands on my shoulders, as if to catch me. Bad move on her part - it only made my sneak-thiefing easier. "I'm so sorry!" she cried. It had sounded like she meant it - I'm a good judge of sincerity. Was that why I felt so terribly right now?
It had been all to easy to swipe her wallet. As I stared back at her, I frowned. I had definitely ruined her day, I'm sure. No shopping or movies or whatever their plans were for her. Unless her friends spotted her. Thinking back on their raccoon-eye makeup jobs and piercing stares, I doubted it. Her parents would be angry.
But she would survive. I had.
"Hey, that girl took my wallet," came Blonde Sidebraid's voice. I had been staring back at her while drifting along in my absent-minded reverie, like some kind of chump who just got kicked out of his parents' house and thought himself a hood-rat. "Damnit, Jo, you're better than this," I whispered under my breath as I turned and began to walk, fast.
Sidebraid wasn't having it. "Hey! Hey you! I think you have my wallet!" I put my head down, staring down my long legs, eyes tracing the patterns on my pink fishnet leggings to my black combat boots, past those at the concrete squares that made up the sidewalk. I watched each line pass. One. Two. Three. "Hey!" Four. Five. Six. "She took my wallet!"
An arm - hairy and veiny and male - reached out to grab me, and my lightning-fast hand shot out and gripped it like a thrusting cobra. I bent the fingers back in one fluid motion, and it pulled away in recoil.
"Stop, miss!" came another voice. "Hey you!" And Sidebraid, crying out, "Please, come back!"
It was no longer worth it, I pulled the wallet from the inside pocket in my khaki green jacket, and threw it up in the air. Then, I bolted. Sidebraid's parents wouldn't be mad, after all. But I'd still be hungry unless I found another mark or turned a trick. The first, finding another mark, would be near impossible, it was 6 in the evening. People would be more wary. The criminally-inclined, and there were many of us in this city, would be more likely to smash a raggedy-looking, 5 foot 1 streetkid's head in for trying. The second, selling myself, didn't appeal to me, either, though I had done it many a time.
I said before that my actions never made me feel bad. I did what I had to to survive. To eak out a living. My "daily bread" as the Christian tracts that my mother kept on the back of our toilet read. But I lied. Prostitution makes me feel horrible. To the pit of my stomach.
No, not for me. I'm not that delicate. I know I am spoiled goods. The offspring of a scared, abused little girl who had grown, only physically and in no other way, into a woman and the abusive, alcoholic animal that had reminded her of her own father so much that she had clung to him. I am Jo Jeffries, the daughter of Tamara and Lee. I understand and accept who and what I am. I have ascended beyond simple things like pride or self-esteem. I have been molded, in the crucible that was my childhood, into a higher form of being. No, I don't feel horrible for me. But for the men.
First of all, the idea of paying for sex in one of the most sexually-liberated eras of human history is just odd, to me. I feel like selling ice to an Eskimo when I get picked up by a man. Virgins are rarer than unicorns these days, and monogamy, while not completely extinct, seems to be pretty temporary among everyone between the ages of 13 and 69.
Secondly, they all tell me they love me. I told you before that I am a good judge of sincerity. It's like my superpower, my one inherent talent. I don't think I've ever been successfully lied to. And let me tell you, many of these men mean it, which hurts. The gesture I show them is so miniscule, so selfish, so impersonal, and they fall in love with me. How hurting, how horribly damaged does one have to be for a financial transaction to make them "fall in love"? And the few that don't mean it when they say it? Those are worse. Their eyes are dead, like corpses. It isn't just me they tell they love and don't, I know. It's their families. Their friends. Sports. Books.
I have no love for people, of course. A bit of empathy, I suppose, but no love or admiration. I do love things, though. Fantasy novels, or novels of any kind. Hot dogs. Dogs. Oolong tea. Baseball. Watermelon. I love babies, untainted yet by their own human nature, or so oblivious that it doesn't matter. Trees. Snow. Writing. I love many things. These men though, love nothing.
Those are the clientele of a prostitute - let no one ever tell you different. Men so broken that they'll love anything, or so broken that they can love nothing. It kills me to be around these men. Yet as I turned the street and passed a young, professional-looking couple with hot, doggie-bagged Tiki Masala in hand exiting a restaurant, I realized my hunger pangs might kill me just as dead. I turned down the alley-way. 6:25. They might be throwing out leftovers at this time - cancelled take-out orders by couples who didn't communicate their dinner plans. The pickings of suburban kids whose parents were trying to show them a little culture. I traipsed down the alley way, the thought of coriander and sorta-still-warm naan tickling my tongue.
There was no dumpster on the left side of the building, but I saw that the alley made a right-angled turn to the right, down behind the building. It must be there. I hurried along, my hopes naively rising despite my years of experience living on the streets. The dumpster lay before me, against the back wall of the Taj Mahal. Big and blue, standing there like the Ark of the Covenant, and inside I would find manna from the heavens. I flung it open, and a rat scattered. I tore open the only black garbage bag in there with the fury of ten thousand wolverines.
Shitty diapers.
Most people would curse, but I hadn't cursed in years. Since I left home to come to the city. I am not opposed to it, nor am I offended by people who choose to. I just feel like I should save them, in case I ever need them again. The f-word, I feel especially, is like fine china of expressing yourself. I'm not going to get it out over some BBQ potato salad with the Johnson's. I will save it, for when the Emperor of Japan brings me sushi.
Hungry, exhasted, and kicking myself in the rear for messing up my pickpocket job, I slumped down beside the dumpster, laying in the lee it formed with the wall running perpendicular to it. My tummy growled angrily at my surrender. "Unless you have any ideas," I murmured to it, and sleep took me almost immediately.
* * *
I awoke what seemed like immediately, the sobbing of my mother echoing in my ears as my dreams faded back into my subconscious. I gazed up at the stars, twinkling like so many diamonds in the night sky. I'm not being poetic. Did you know that diamonds aren't actually rare at all? Their scarcity is a conspiracy made by money-hungry diamond companies - so is giving them to women. Prior to a broad advertising campaign, aimed at men, women scarcely wore diamonds. They aren't very pretty. If I was romantically-inclined, I'd think I'd want a ruby or a pearl in my ring. Though, right now, I'd rather onion rings.
I rubbed my eyes and looked at my watch. It was June and dark, and so it must be after 9. 9:15 said my pocket watch as I produced it from the inside pocket of my khaki jacket and flicked it open. Lifted from a client. Some sort of professory-looking dude. I loved it. He was one of the ones who meant it when he said he loved me, if you're wondering.
As I arose to my feet, my knees shook like some sort of infant bovid taking its first steps. Holy, was I ever hungry. Biting my lip, I took a quick inventory of when I had last eaten. Day or two ago, I thought. I had used the last bit of my money and bought make-up like a short-sighted idiot. Hey, I know that you probably, by now, think that I'm quite weird... but every girl likes to get some new make-up. In this, I'm no exception.
I am quite naturally pretty - the universe is too chaotic for me not to be. My father was devilishly handsome, my mother, the epitome of a southern belle. If they were ugly as well as tremendously-screwed up, it would be too fishy. The universe, or God or fate or whatever, would draw too much attention to itself. So, my family was low-born, dysfunctional, violent, uneducated. But we looked alright.
Knees still knocking together like a starving African child about to drop (ok, that one was bad), I began to sort of hobble down the alleyway. I was positively ravenous now. I figured I'd head down to the corner of Claymore and Rosalia. A dimly lit area, with a Lebanese-owned pizza shop on the way, it was a gathering area for whores, johns, and pimps. It was almost quaint in its stereotypical look. Like a bunch of black youths holding a boombox and looking menacing while their vehicle bounces on hydraulic pumps - you wouldn't think it actually ever existed unless you saw it. But, I swear, it was there. At the very least, maybe some of the less feral whores would buy me a slice and a can of coke.
Hookers, other than me, were mostly two breeds. Matronly, with a lot of love in their heart, or wild she-jackals that would go off on you if you so much looked at then wrong. Primarily, I kicked it with the former.
Old Linda might have some change to spare.
As I took another step, down through the alley, my combat boot made a weird, gushing sound. My eyes shot down almost immediately. You can step on some nasty stuff in this city. I once planted my foot in human excrement.
This time, though, it was blood. Thick, viscous blood, shimmering black in the moonlight. It was pooling in an indentation in the pavement on the alley floor, flowing from down in the darkness. I flicked my butterfly knife opened.
"Hello?" I cried out in the darkness. I almost kicked myself for being that girl. I had seen my fair share of horror flicks, and I always laughed at those broads. Like the killer is going to pipe up, "Hey there, nice weather we're having." Damn it, Jo. I guess the impulse is universal. I walked forward, really wishing I had eaten something. I didn't want to have to scrap with some gangbangers while feeling so frail.
She lay there, barely illuminated. Beautiful, in an eerie way. Her dress was white, with yellow daisies dancing on it, almost as if they were real, in a field somewhere down South, swaying in the wind, stretching toward as if begging Sol Invicta to pick them up in her loving arms and reward them with a kiss on the face. It was too finely made for her to be a whore, too new.
Her face had been smashed in. No, not smashed. Caved in. I am not squeamish, but it was too much for even my lizard-brain to process. I hurled involuntarily. Less than a mouthful of bile came up, and my stomach contracted so badly that even the worst period I had ever had felt like a tummy-rub. Still, curiosity had me. Or a sense of duty. Something. I spit what little liquid - I cannot truly call it vomit - that was in my mouth behind me, and tip-toed forward. Her foot had been hacked off. Just the right one, and the flat that had once been on it was gone, though its partner still was on her left foot. Our killer had a foot-fetish, perhaps?
She was petite. She was maybe fifteen, sixteen. Pretty, in that awkward sort of way girls are when they're no longer strictly "girls" but aren't quite women. A pretty blonde braid was on the side of her head, descending over her shoulder and across her bosom, which had been exposed by a rip in her dress.
Blonde Sidebraid. My mark from earlier.
I did something that I hadn't done since I had left my childhood home, my crucible, the cocoon from which I had emerged a new, higher being. I fell down onto my knees, crawled like a wounded animal over to the little doe with the smashed-in face and stolen foot, and curled up next to her body, her coagulating blood sticking to my coat and leaking through, cold, onto my skin.
And I cried.
