Ma Petite Angel

It was a warm yet cloudy day in Toulon, France, 1936.  Evangeline, a young girl of only eight, was in the back of the Pâtisserie de la Creme Glace sweeping the floor before she went home for lunch.  Her family was not small and was not wealthy.  Since she was the oldest of the children she was expected to get a job during the first part of the day to bring money in and come home and help her mother take care of the babes after lunch.  She wore a plain, thin flower printed dress that had been made from the best of one of her mother's previously tattered dresses and was a bit too big for her.  It was best to be made that way though, so she could wear it longer while she grew.  Her shoes were the ragged, brown, patent leather ones that she had gotten last year from her cousin.  Already well used they had been falling apart at the sole, but her father had been able to fix them well enough.  Now, however, it wasn't so much a matter of functionality or fashion as it was of size.  They began to pinch her toes a few weeks ago, but she wouldn't say anything until she had to.  It seemed that the only things she wore that fit were not her own.  The once white, now dingy yellow-gray cleaning smock and the rag she had asked the shop owner, Louie, for to keep her hair back.  The rag had smelled of old bourbon, chewing tobacco, and some other pungent and putrid smell that she couldn't identify but guessed to be Louie's stale sweat.  She had taken the rag home and washed it best she could but no matter how hard she tried the odor always seemed to seep back out by the end of the day.  It was a wonder that it didn't reek of her own foul stench from the way Louie usually worked her.  She was the only one with small enough appendages to reach into all the nooks and crannies of the giant, old, iron creme glace maker.  He would have her come in extra early in the mornings, long before they opened, just to clean the machines some days.  Still, she made less than a franc a day for all of her tedious labor.