Road to Damascus

Chapter 3 - Carefully

Author's Note: I'm rather enjoying writing this book, and I hope you're enjoying it as well.

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Diana watched the retreating back of her roommate as he trudged down the hall to his room, before the slam of his bedroom door shook her out of her thoughts.

She hummed curtly before mimicking Duke, and giving the small space a once-over.

It was definitely a step up from the shelter floor, but she knew it was well below the city's standards of basic living.

She'd known worse. She'd known hard floors and concrete walls that exacerbated the harsh climates. She'd known one-windowed rooms for most of her upbringing, so despite the nicotine-stained walls of the shoebox apartment, it was a step up.

A wave of nostalgia hit her as she took in the couches, which had definitely been held onto as soon as they had been ordered from an 80s Habitat catalogue. Her grandmother had a set quite similar to it that she'd purchased in 2005.

Her eyes found themselves focused on the arm of the couch, just at the crevice where the arm sank against the cushion seat. Cigarette burns that polka-dotted the edge.

She pulled her face into a scowl as she imagined an oversized man thrown against the couch, in a stained wife-beater,  a warm beer in one hand, and a half-burned Pall Mall resting over the arm of the chair in the other.

Considering the walls were off-white, teetering on yellow with the hue that filmed the ceiling, the walls, and she'd even seen it on the linoleum countertops, her imagination couldn't have been far off.

Tutting her tongue, she readjusted her bags piled with laundry and made her way out of the dreary apartment.

It wasn't much - it was an eyesore in fact - but it was a step up. 

As she bounded down the stairs, she acknowledged that in the two years she'd been in the country, this was her first sign of progress. She couldn't even consider the shelter anything other than dumb luck, and even then, the conditions of the shelter were barely manageable.

The day she walked in through the doors of the shelter, a glimmer of hope had engulfed her as her eyes landed on the row of cots, the buzzing of the heating lamps, and the smell of warm food. As soon as she walked through the door, she was guided into a queue filled with bustling bodies. The smell that oozed from some of the shelter's patrons was not lost to her, but gratitude and relief washed over her at just being indoors.

Now, she was walking out of her new four-cornered home. 

Standing outside the brick building, she quickly rummaged through her red fanny pack. It's cheap decals already pealing off, but she didn't expect anything else - she'd gotten it at Goodwill a few months prior. Five-finger discount.

In it, she'd stored a mangled mess of keys - only one set she knew which doors they opened - an empty MetroCard, a small pocket knife that she'd found in the shelter, and as she'd counted earlier, twelve dollars and fifty cents in exact change. 

She exhaled a sigh of relief and counted again on her fingers. The crumpled notes and loose coins were what stood between her and destitution until her next paycheck.

As she walked down the busy street, she reminisced on how her luck had turned drastically in the past two months. 

After spending the past three months just hovering and trying to make it in the shelter, where she was used to barely edible food, stiff cots - on the nights she was lucky - Jude had made sure that Diana was one of the first in the shelter to know about the funded housing plan.