Willow Locke - Anarchist Detective

Shek

Clinging to the corner of the dusty building, non-color rags blending with the brick. There she was—her broom slipped from her grasp—huddled over herself to ward off the evening chill. On seventh, nowhere near the meeting spot, hidden away.
Zilpah ran to her sister, caught her up in her arms
"Where were you? I walked the whole block."
Shek unentwined herself to look up at her, face smudged with dirt, long tangled hair, starlit blue eyes. Zilpah held her sister, a bundle of rags. It was part of her mother's grift,better for business. Zilpah bought good clothes for Shek—more resources burned, more for her mother to sell to the second hand store.
Shek held up a crumpled bill.
"I got too much money Zil! Five whole dollars! I'm scared—what will happen to mama?"
"Shh, we'll hide it—save it up in a bank account."
"What for?"
"One day we'll have a better life."
Zilpah folded the dirty five dollar bill into her boot and swung Shek's broom over her shoulder. She took her sister's cold hand, warmed it with her breath.
"Are you hungry?"
Shek nodded, biting her lip.
"This will warm you up!" Zilpah produced a steaming package of brown wax paper, tied with red and white twine. Something she had purchased from the vendor.
"Hot corn!" Shek unwrapped it and began to eat greedily.
"Come on, we're going to take the subway."
"Home?"—suddenly anxious, mouth full.
"No, we're going to meet Hannah uptown."
Shek skipped happily along to the station entrance, brandishing her corn like a conductor's baton. Shek loved Hannah, who was always light-hearted and playful with her. In a different world, in a different family, Shek would be a child—not a vendor, and Zilpah would be joyful too. Hannah's optimism was one more expensive trinket that she just couldn't afford—like Ayala's problems with her suitors.
Zilpah threw a suspicious glance over her shoulder as they descended the littered stairs to the subway platform. She felt overcome by a suffocating helplessness.
There was nothing she could do to improve her sister's life. Childhood was not a universal phase, it was a luxury. Standing on the platform staring down at the forlorn child, drab as a sparrow, gnawing the corncob bare, she thought of the illustrations in the Macy's catalog. Black ink drawings of little girls swathed in taffeta, clean curled hair, unwrapping a present, tumbling on the floor with a kitten. It was only a fiction, vapid and cruel—just like every fiction.
If anyone deserved to live that way it was Shek. Didn't she deserve to be a child? Same as the wealthy on the upper east? But she was not a child, she was a vendor. What would a drawing of Shek look like? Barely human by comparison.
That's why it bothered her. When her sister was around Hannah she saw the joyful child she could have been. It was an excruciating reminder, like the drawings in the Macy's catalog. Hannah innocently coaxed out Shek's joy, and it was Zilpah's job to push it back down, to smother it and reinforce their grim routine of earning and squander, with no hope of change. Shek's joy was so fragile, so beautiful, like a crystal wine glass. She hated her friend for revealing it. She hated herself for suppressing it.
Their lives were a Gordian knot bound tight around her heart. They could never hope to be free. And yet, somehow, Hannah had kindled some hidden spark in her. She had drawn her in, insisted she tell Alva everything. Now they were standing on the platform waiting for the train to take them uptown, to Alva's mansion.
The knot couldn't be untied but maybe it could be cut—if only she had the courage to risk everything. The train arrived and the doors hissed open. She pulled Shek inside and grabbed the loop, balancing herself against the motion of the train with the broom. Shek held onto the broom too, still gnawing her corn, and they swayed together in the flickering electric light as the train sped uptown.