The House of Marcellinus

Arc 2: Slum Girl - 1

Jennifer Brooks, who would later take the name of Alexia Trevesta, woke up that morning and finally accepted the fact that she wasn't going to make it.

It had been two months since the money had run out, and nearly two weeks since the last of the food had run out too. She had tried to make it last longer, but nothing had worked out like she planned. In the dead of night when the cold had worked its way through the old rotting walls of the abandoned apartment building she was squatting in, and made a good start working its way through her ratty blankets, her self control inevitably gave out.

It was the hopelessness that got to her. Laying alone and shivering, even a small bite of stale bread gave her the faint sense that there was some sliver of hope left, even if she knew it wasn't true. She assumed it was just a slight bump in blood glucose, but it made her feel better. Hope was what she needed– or had thought she needed– and so the food hadn't lasted as long as it should have.

She slept to save energy, but her stomach hadn't stuck to the plan and kept waking her up with its pangs. She had the image in her head that it was twisting itself into knots, one side grating against the other like sandpaper on sandpaper, trying to digest itself. She decided that she had to do something while she still had the energy to move.

The morning sun poured in through the window of her little room, making the floating dust dance and sparkle. She had chosen this room because it was the first one she had found with unbroken windows, and because it was on the second floor, making it less likely that someone might wander in during the night.

Jennifer got up and tucked her blankets away in a net she had hung from the ceiling– her way of making sure the rats didn't nest in them– and went to look at herself in the mirror over the sink. Her face was gaunt, her sunken cheeks and eyes causing her cheekbones to poke out, making a face that was all angles, completely different from the soft oval it had once been. Her blonde hair reached to her shoulders and told the story of her life in the slums. It was thick and healthy at the ends, then by degrees grew thinner and paler as it ran up to her head. The roots looked horrible, like what might grow from the head of an ancient old crone. It wasn't the hair or the face or anything that should belong to a girl of 18 years.

Clothes were OK. Dirty old rags, but they still covered everything, thanks to the sewing kit she had stolen from her parents' home before escaping into the slums.

She removed her make-shift barricade from the door and went through the hall and down the stairs, shattered glass crunching beneath her feet. She laid her shoulder into the emergency exit door, the squeal of its creaking hinges announcing her emergence to the outside world. The fresh, crisp air hit her face, reminding her how dank and musty it was in her room.

She ducked through a half-collapsed wire fence with an old sign hanging on it. It was actually two signs, one pasted on top of the other. One read 'CONDEMNED BY ORDER OF THE STATE' in bold red letters, and the older one under it said 'Proposed land use' with faded out letters telling who to contact if you wanted to complain about it.

She headed the only direction she knew, which was deeper into the slums. You could buy food there if you had money, and could catch a beating if you had the audacity to beg. Much worse if you got caught stealing. But that's where the food was, so it was the only place to go.

The place she had chosen to live was on the outskirts of the slums, so there weren't many people out here. The tumble-down red brick buildings she passed as she made her way were gutted by fire and stank with decay. Rusted bars covered many of the shattered windows and rusted external fire escape stairs lined up against the apartments, protruding from their buildings like bones from the carcasses of rotting fish. The bottom levels of most of these had collapsed, having been completely eaten through by the rust or pulled down by vandals. If the stairs were the fish bones, the brickwork flaked off like scales and the blackened paneless windows stared out at the world like dead sunken eye sockets.