Straight On Til' Mourning

I.

She has been hiding out in the basement for weeks now, sleeping around half-open boxes of Clue and Life and Monopoly, question cards making blue-grey train tracks around her bed of couch cushions. The wind is winsome but also unfriendly; it whistles when it wants her attention, shrill in alarm, but its pleas have been battered and cut up against the broken glass of the window sill. All that reaches her ears is shush, shush.

Kirsten was not on the run. She was exactly where she needed to be. The month is July and the date is uncertain. Tourists have spilled across the beach like a virus, a profusion of plastic umbrellas, sprawled towels, shrieking laughter, and miscellaneous children. Sometimes, before the tide has risen and the water is cool from the night, she takes walks along the shore. Sinks her toes into the damp sand. Listens to the waves humming their infinite melodies as they peak towards, away, fall into the horizon.

When she isn't walking, she's working. The red-light district is a few blocks from the boardwalk. Even the smoke is different, here - it sidles blue out the doors, goes up, up, up and curdles in the face of the stars. By the end of her shift her fingers smell like pickles, vodka, and pineapples. Her arms are wrung-out from wiping tables and ends of bars. Though her pockets should be heavy with tips, most nights she walks home light and empty. The spaces where money and light and humanity should be are instead hollows.

And she wakes up, when she wakes up, alone.