Escape

He smacked her.  It was a hard smack.  It was meant to be hard.  She lay whimpering on the bed, curled into a foetal ball, her skimpy dress lying high showing that she wore stockings attached to a garter belt but nothing else.  The nastiness that streamed from him drenched her like a flash-storm, it entered her being tearing its way in with a calculated dementia, leaving its meaning and its scars imprinted indelibly.  It was a predator, like a cat with its prey, playing, teasing, knowing every movement, sealing every sense of purpose and of escape.  It was endless.  It was unceasing. 

She writhed inwardly, she tried not to move, she tried to be silent.  His voice when it came was the same old voice, not loud, never shouting, never hectoring, merely insidious, quiet, invading like a serpent with flickering tongue and still all-seeing eyes.

"Now, you bitch, you do it my way, there is no other way, I own you, you are nothing without me, you are mine, you don't forget it and you say nothing, nothing to anyone, bitch, scum, worthless whore. Do you get it?"  She moved only to nod her head in acquiescence.

The work wasn't so hard, what she did was a natural part of her, an instinct, a way that meant, when she was on the job, she was in charge regardless of how she modified and changed and developed for the pleasure of the mark.  No, pleasure was not the word, not pleasure, the word was fooling.  Fooling the mark.

How it had started she tried to forget.  The end result had her tied to this  heartless scheming relentless overseer who beat her much in the way that her father had beaten her -- her reason for running in the first place. The city was large, the bodies, even at night, swarmed, teeming like gross insects; scrabbling, sometimes furtively hiding concealed in the overwhelming debris of the city, often openly abusive and threatening, her soul-mates in the soulless streets.  She had stood out like a beacon and they hated her for it and it was those who had claimed to be her friend who sold her out to the monster with the sibilant, incisive, reptilian voice.

Promises, so many promises.  He would show her how to make money, how to live in the city, how to satisfy her needs, and, above all, he would be her friend.  Afterwards she knew she had been drugged, she knew he and his henchmen had taken away not only her body but her will to live in any other way but to satisfy him.  He bought the clothes -- they showed her off to perfection, they showed her lure, her enticement, they gave the mark what he thought he wanted.  Ironic that the perfection of her clothes was in the end wasted, the clothes had to be off or, at the least, displaced.  If the city ordinances had allowed, she and those like her would have walked the streets naked.

She rolled to the edge of the bed and sat up.  He had gone, she was alone with her thoughts and her anguish and the pain.  He never hurt her enough to mark her except indelibly inside where the customers couldn't see, except, sometimes, the perceptive ones saw it in her eyes and wondered only to drop the thoughts to pursue their own bodies.  The room was small but it was tidy and was just one of a number that were let out to girls just like her -- the truth was that the landlady had once been a girl like her and was still held captive by the monster, her monster.  He was an unprincipled bastard, she knew that but there was nothing she could do about it the only hope was to get away completely and out of his grasp.

The hope and the joy that had been her youth was long gone in only a few months of his promises, his care.  She couldn't see how she could go backwards or forwards from the vice that she was in;  a vice that held her in its jaws, a vice that held her in its claws.  She seethed and roiled churning inside her own impotence but she knew in her own way that she wasn't impotent she was pregnant and her moral judgement, what was left of it, lay within her.  He had turned her, tainted and dirty, into a monster in his image and yet there was innocence burgeoning and she could not allow it to be trapped in what was left of her uncertain life.

There was a way, the way was open despite his savage hold on her.  The conflict was over, she had made it so and she was as happy as she would ever be. 

Outside,  her pitch was open, untenanted, just as it should be; there were others, older, younger, more beautiful - but not many - and the rest, but they kept their distance and space.  She watched as he harangued one of them.  Even he couldn't do two things at the same time.  She slipped away, down, down and towards the river that would take her to its breast so easily, so consolingly.