The Errant Heiress

Prologue - How I Wonder

Prologue – How I Wonder

It’s something, the sky. All the little stars, swirling in the indigo emptiness like champagne bubbles in God’s crystal flute, dancing their millennial dance night after night, unchanging. No, that’s not true. I remember my dad telling me as much as we were sitting on the jetty behind the shack I grew up in. He was a sea captain, and he knew about that sort of stuff, you see.

The stars, they change their pattern just a little each night. Not that you can tell, because they’re so far away. It takes thousands and thousands of years for anyone to notice. So it’s more like a clock, losing the tiniest part of a second each hour, and you only ever notice after a couple of weeks, when the lost time collects bit by bit until it’s something you can measure. Something you begin to miss.

So it’s like this giant celestial clock, the starry sky. It’s beautiful, and its beauty calls to you. The twinkling little lights... And the spaces in between; the dark velvet nothing. The call of the void... Maybe we’re afraid of it. Awed by the immensity of the thing. Maybe that’s why we spend so much time looking down at our own feet. Hell, I wouldn’t be looking up now, past the crumbling brick tenements and the garish neon glow if I wasn’t lying on my ass in a heap of trash in an alley.

I got six slugs in me. Four of them are bourbon, and those I know I can handle. The two that are lead... well, those are something of an immediate concern, if you catch my drift. Still, can’t say I’m surprised. There was always a chance I’d walk myself into this sort of a mess, in my line of work. I knew the risks when I took the job. What was I supposed to do? A girl’s got to make a living.

I suppose I should be grateful I’m not lying face down, grateful for this little scrap of sky. The celestial clock, ticking away. Gives me something to stare at glassily, as I inevitably rethink all the steps I took, all the choices I made that led me to this. It began, ironically, with a dame...