by Tshombe
“The kid who called my name was Zach. He was the pack leader of our roving group that day. It was me, him, and two skinny girls. I can’t remember the other girl’s names right now, but Zach sent me with a girl named Summer. She was really pretty, and her hair was green. We went behind a Chinese restaurant and dug through the trash. Summer showed me the value of moldy food. I must tell you, Charles, until you’ve looked for your next meal in a trash can, you haven’t lived. Finding a half-eaten meal, sometimes a whole uneaten portion, was like winning a prize.
“We put what we found in zip-lock bags, then went to another dumpster at a Mexican restaurant, then a burger place, and we just repeated the process with each stop. When we were satisfied with our bounty we went back to the main hallway and begged for money from Uncle Sam’s guests. Summer was smart. She used a hat and some dirt to cover up my beaten face. I caught a glimpse of myself in a clothing store window after my makeover. Dirt all over my face, but I didn’t look beaten.
“At the end of the day in a back-alley Zach divided up the food and money in a process that seemed to have no methodology. Summer gave me a bag to put my food portions in and we went back to the warehouse. Gavin was watching me from the moment I walked in; his eyes locked on the bag in my hand. Trembling, I presented it to him. He ripped it from my palm without saying a word. The bag had a piece of pizza, some chicken chow-mein, pieces of steak and hamburger, and the money I’d bummed, probably about forty-five dollars. He seemed satisfied and he didn’t hit me. I was relieved.
“That night we ate our garbage scraps, and everyone seemed to be smiling. Gavin sat next to me by the open fire and finally asked me my name. Our first conversation began while we watched the old furniture burn.
“As the light flickered in his brown eyes turning them gold he said, ‘This world is not real.’ I didn’t understand. He said, ‘Look around you. How many of us catch, kill, or harvest our own food? How many of us like the natural smell of man and woman? The smell of a man’s breath without toothpaste? The reason he shaves his face, or she shaves her legs is because we are ashamed of who we are. It all reflects the fantasy.’”
The woman took a sip from her wine glass and studied the condition of her victim. The man could barely hold open his eyes. Death had entered the small space they shared. A deep voice rose once again from far within her and shot through the room, twisting her face in its production.
“I didn’t tell you to stop, Cassandra!”
“I’m tired, Eva. You talk to him.”
She gently set her wine glass down, as her face contorted again.
“Cassandra, you don’t want to let me talk to him because I’m going to tell him the truth.”
“I don’t care, Eva! I just don’t feel like talking to him anymore. Please let me stop! Please!”
“Fine, you big cry baby. You can stop for now. I want to talk to him anyway.”
The woman before him smiled, her face still twisted, and rose from her seat. The man opened his eyes as best he could to watch her walk toward the lamp lying on its side where she stood it back upright. Her newly illuminated face was changed. Her eyes had grown even colder, her smile more devilish, even the tone of her skin seemed altered. Maybe he was just delirious from the poison.
“Hello, Charles,” she purred, “my name is Eva. You’ve already met my dear friend, Cassandra. She really doesn’t like to talk much but I, on the other hand, do. I love to talk. Especially to people that hurt us. I talked to Gavin, not Cassandra. She was afraid of him. She’s always been like that, ever since the first day I met her.
“She was a quiet little thing that nobody paid attention to. It was like she was invisible or something. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know she was there until I caught her staring at me. So, I picked the kid up, put her under my wing, and we hit the road. She’s not that bright, you know.”
Eva leaned in so that she could whisper, “She really believes that shit about my Uncle Sam.”
Her shrill laugh sent chills through the man’s body.
“I went on the road in search of my father and she went on the road in search of freedom. Neither of us got what we wanted.
“My grandmother always told me to do what made me happy. I wonder sometimes if that had anything to do with us not being related. I wasn’t her blood. My mom just dropped me off with her saying someday she would return. Well, I wasn’t going to wait forever. So I grabbed Cassandra and left.
“I really don’t know why she talks about this Shadow person. I’ve never seen him, but she always seems to. She’s a little crazy, you know.
“Anyway, I don’t know why I thought staying in a warehouse was a good idea. It was close to the bus station. Kids stayed there. I wasn’t trying to get picked up by the cops, so it seemed a good idea. Well, that bastard Gavin took advantage of us. You know how we ended up leaving him? That asshole sold us. Typical man. Gets what he wants from you, then he’s gone. He sold us to some low-life scumbag named Coke. A tall, thin, light-skin black dude, he was handsome with long wavy hair. Now that guy was some piece of work. He was a pimp. I was twelve-years-old.”
Her eyes softened, widening as they filled with tears.
“Eva, I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to think about Coke. Please stop, Eva. Please!”
As easily as they had softened, her eyes narrowed as they hardened with Eva’s return.
“Shut up, Cassandra. I don’t want to hear your whining. You said you wanted me to talk. Well, I’m talking. So you shut up.”
The man noticed he couldn’t fully feel his legs; paralysis had begun to consume him from the bottom up. Death crept slowly closer; though in his mind, it couldn’t come fast enough.
“This bitch doesn’t want to talk about it because she liked it. Every time I asked her to take care of him she did so without complaint. Now, I’m the bad girl. Fuck you, Cassandra!”
A thick silence blanketed the room. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail and regained her composure.
“Yeah, Coke was our second master in the house of Uncle Sam. The first night with him was memorable. He raped us in a cheap motel room and threatened to kill us if we ever left. How many times had we heard that one already?
“We were so young, he couldn’t put us on the street. He kept us in motel rooms with his goons watching to make sure we didn’t leave. Night after night, satisfying man after man, in hope of one day being satisfied ourselves. There was never a day off, and Cassandra was too afraid to do the work in the motels, so I had to do it. I had to do it every night. I always hated it, but when you do something enough you become numb to it. I became numb to the work, like every other job I have had. Just another day closer to death.
“One night, a customer spit in my face, slapped me and then urinated inside of me. Until you’ve felt that type of humiliation, you haven’t been degraded. I almost wished he would have killed me, but he just wanted to degrade me even more. I don’t remember much about that night. I just remember waking up on the floor looking at the puddle oozing from his head, the top of his skull smashed in with a hammer that Cassandra insisted we keep with us while I worked. Good thinking, huh?
“I had never seen a dead body before, so I walked up to it and stuck my fingers in the warm blood. It felt so good to see that bastard dead like that. If anyone deserved to be dead, it was him. I kicked him hard in the head and blood squirted everywhere. Parts of his skull cracked and spattered. Some of it got on my mouth. I didn’t wipe it off, I licked it. It was the best thing I had tasted since entering the hallway.”
She took her time, studying his beaten face as she moved closer to him. The man strained to watch her and flinched as she leaned in and licked his partially clotted, bloody face.
“You don’t taste as good as he did,” she laughed, “nothing is ever as good as the first time. Ever.
Well, Coke came to get us because I wouldn’t open the door for anyone else. Cassandra insisted that we open the
door for him. He came in all mad, but when he saw that body on the floor, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. That was the first time I’d ever seen fear in a man’s eyes. His mouth fell wide open looking at the dead man on the floor and the sight of me covered in blood. At that moment, I knew I had power over him. We stood quietly, locked in place, staring eye to eye for what felt like an eternity until one of his goons came and recommended that we leave. We walked to the car in silence. The entire ride back to his house, a place I’d never been before that day, he did not say a word.
“The front of his home looked like a real castle complete with fountains, pillars, double doors, and a circular driveway filled with all different kinds of beautiful cars. We entered his house and two girls who didn’t look that much older than me met us at the door in negligees; both were tall with hour-glass figures, one blonde, one brunette. He directed them to take me to the bathroom. They looked horrified by my bloodied appearance but did as they were told. We went into the bathroom where they undressed me and drew water for the bath. I must have looked like a zombie. They washed my hair and the rest of my body while I just sat there unable to wash my own body.
“The first time we spoke, Gina the brown-haired girl, was brushing my hair as the other girl, Lauren, watched. Gina asked me if I killed one of them. I looked in her eyes trying to see who she was, and I saw just as much pain as I felt. I introduced myself, ‘Hi my name is Eva, on the street they call me Cassandra.’ I guess that answered her question because she made no more mention of it and we started talking about our old lives, what we wanted to do in the future, how we liked to dress, and our favorite shampoo. Things like that were easy to talk about. We didn’t talk about work; the sleazy service for money off the street.
“I woke up the next day to the smell of breakfast. I hadn’t smelled home-cooked breakfast since I lived in foster care. Now, three years later, it still smelled the same. Since then I had begged for money on the street, dug through dumpsters for food, and lived in abandoned buildings for two years. I was fourteen years old and a professional prostitute. I had just woken up in a house the day after murdering a man, to the smell of breakfast being cooked.”
She walked closer to her victim so that they were nose-to-nose, the smell of her breath intoxicating him even through the fog of her poison. Undeniably, she was a remarkable looking woman drunk off power and liquor. She spoke, “Do I look like someone who’d been through all that at fourteen? Oh Charles, nothing is ever what it seems.”
She Found Love
She poured another glass of wine and ingested a pill, closing her eyes to savor the moment. The man watched her feeling the cold breath of death crawl up his body as she continued her story.
“Me, Gina, and Lauren became a team. We went on trips out of town. We served Coke’s exclusive clientele and we ran his house. I had a lot of fun during those days. Cassandra and I barely talked.
“That’s the funny thing about life, nothing ever stays the same. I can’t stand it when things are going good for me because I know it won’t last. At least when things are going bad, you can expect that they will eventually get better. It’s never fun to go from happy to sad.
“Coke got busted. The Feds came and raided the house. I had a fake I.D., so I didn’t get busted for being a minor. I figured it’d be better to go to jail as an adult than stay a minor and be sent back into the foster care system. I got busted for prostitution, kidnapping, and suspicion of accessory in a murder. I had never been finger-printed before, so I officially became an adult. I was seventeen-years-old.
“I had no idea why they gave me those charges. How did they know about me? How did they know what I had done? I could understand Coke getting busted, but why did they get me?
“That night I fell asleep in a cold cell after trying all night to figure it out. I had a dream while I was in jail that I found my father. It felt so real, not like I was dreaming. When I awoke the next day, I realized my father was the reason I went on this excursion in the first place. Then, for the first time I could remember I cried. I cried; and I cried for so long my tears led me back to an exhausted sleep.
“I awoke to a tall, burly, black man with a thick beard standing at the door. He was a sheriff. I sat up, immediately defensive. No man was worth anything good and I knew this one was here to bring me pain.
“He smiled at me, and said ‘Now you’re scared?’ He dropped some papers on the floor, slamming the cell door closed. I could hear him laughing as he walked away down the hall; his laugh echoing into the distance.
“I was afraid. So, I went to the only safe happy place, back to sleep. A voice woke me. Cassandra. I was so happy to hear her. I knew she wouldn’t ever leave me alone.”
“No, Eva, I will never leave you alone. I will always be with you. I think I should tell this part of the story.”
Tears ran down the woman’s face. She was visibly shaken by something. Her eyes turned softer in Cassandra’s tone.
“I read the papers to Eva. The words cut her like a knife. Her friend, Gina, had been working for the F.B.I. for at least two years wearing a wire. Eva didn’t want to believe it. Besides me, Gina and Lauren had been her only friends ever. Finding out that friendship had been a lie hardened Eva from then on. She refuses to let anyone get close. There would be no more friends for me and Eva.
“I hated Gina. I wanted her to pay for what she had done, but honestly in that world what more could we expect?
“In the courtroom, I watched Gina recount all the things that Eva had shared with her in confidence. What kind of friend does that? What kind of friend tells your most personal thoughts to a room full of strangers? This is not a friend!
“Eva was found not guilty of the accessory to murder charge because the evidence was shaky. But she was found guilty of prostitution and kidnapping. The kidnapping was from an incident when Gina and Eva together lured a young lady into the life of prostitution. It was all Gina’s idea. Eva received five years.
“Life in prison was no worse than living on the streets. We were still in Sam’s house. Still living by Sam’s rules.
“Time, we learned, was a thing of value. It’s all we have in this world, and if we do nothing with it, it gives us nothing in return. That’s the moment we began to spend our most valuable asset more wisely. Spending our moments knowing we will never gain them back. No more wasting time.
“Those five years flew by and soon we were back out in the streets. It was my duty to support us because Eva was too traumatized to enter the workplace. In prison, I became a skilled typist and learned computer software inside and out, then I got a job as a waitress. That’s funny, huh? All of my qualifications and I couldn’t even get a job in my field of expertise. No one would hire a convicted felon for office work so I waited tables on my feet all day. The customers were rude. The manager was disrespectful. The pay was horrible. After being a prostitute, the money I got for work like that was insulting. I was twenty-two-years old.”
She paused for a moment and looked at the man. He was not unconscious yet, but he would be in a few moments and this was the part he needed to hear. Their reason for being here… Love.
“I knew she was an angel from the first time I laid eyes on her. I had never seen anyone more beautiful. I watched her eat her food. She’d take small bites until, like magic, the food was gone. I’d seen her in a dream before I met her. Seeing her in the flesh always seemed new, like it’d never happened before.
“One day at work, while my manager was yelling at me about something insignificant, I noticed her sitting in the same seat she had sat in the day before. My heart was pounding. I walked over, took her order, and watched her eat her food in her normal, delicate way. I wanted to say something when she looked my way, but I was frozen, and then she was gone. I was upset with myself for not talking to her more. What if… I could only hope that she would come back tomorrow.
“It was one of the longest days I can remember. Eight at night and the sun
was still out. I decided to wash clothes at the laundromat. Loading the cool, wet clothes into the dryer was a joy. Taking them out was torture. It was hot. Turning to grab my soda I spotted her across the room. This time I wouldn’t be a fool. I walked up to her, a walk that seemed to take forever. Our eyes locked as I moved toward her. When we stood face to face we said nothing. We just stared at each other. I felt as if I had known her all my life. ‘Hi, my name is Rio.’ She said.”
Though barely alive, the man looked up upon hearing the name. The woman laughed knowingly at his recognition.
“That’s why I lured you here. Did you think I was crazy? Did you think this was all some big mistake? You actually thought I was some innocent stranger that needed a lift home? You probably thought when I invited you up here that I would be another one of your conquests. Well Charles, you were wrong. You were really fucking wrong. This time you made a big mistake, the biggest mistake of your life.”
She stopped pacing in front of the semi-conscious man and slapped him viciously across the face, sending a spray of bloody saliva across the floor.
“Rio lived here. The seat you’re sitting in right now was her favorite. That day at the laundromat was the beginning of the happiest time I ever experienced. She was new in town and had been staying at a cheap motel while looking for a place to rent with a roommate. My face couldn’t hide my flutter of excitement upon hearing she wanted a roommate. I jumped to offer her an invitation to stay here at this apartment with me.
“My feet didn’t hurt anymore. I floated at work. A few days later while dumping the trash at the end of my shift, a deep and familiar voice vibrated into my body from behind. It was Shadow. When I least expected, he always came to show my reflection. He tried to warn me that Rio was a sign of death, one that I would see as love. By the time I turned around to see him, he was gone.
