Blue Glass

Interesting Company

Killing someone almost always requires applying lethal pressure, or a sharp knife, or some poison, or a bullet. As a frisch gebackner murderer I should know best. After all, it only took a single stab in the back to kill my mother. What I didn't know was that four grimy walls, leaky drainage pipes, an influx of insects, and an omnipresent cacophony of women shouting at their children, beer bellied men laughing raucously, and the sporadic shrieks of children in a variety of pitches could do the trick just as well.
I had been bracing myself for a sorry display on my way to Wedding by streetcar, but nothing could have prepared me for the piece of shit that gradually unfolded before my eyes. It was literally the personification of a shantytown straight out of Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities. Previously, I thought such squalid places only existed within the brittle pages of such books. Then again, one learns a new thing every day, and life is a great teacher what with all the hands-on experience it has to offer.

Literally everyone in the overcrowded stairwell—women and children alike—turned to stare at me as I entered the first building on the right and made my way up the rickety wooden stairs to the only vacant apartment there was. It was a cubicle of a place at the end of a long hallway on the topmost floor of an apartment building that looked like I could spit at it and it would crash to the ground in a heap of moldy timbers and beams of rotting wood. I guessed they had been staring because they hadn't seen someone looking so...civilized in a long time. The floorboards groaned as I hurried down the short hallway to the single door at the end of the hallway. I shakily unlocked it and pushed the door open.
The first thing that I noticed was the musty, dank smell coming from the apartment. I wrinkled my nose as the stench of wet clothes, old mothballs, and cigarette smoke wafted in my nostrils.
I pulled the cord next to the wall and above me, a single lightbulb on a string sputtered briefly, died, then began to flicker intermittently. It gave the room a somewhat ghoulish aura. I stood there stock still for a while, then lifted my suitcase and proceeded to cross the threshold inside.
The room didn't look any better than what I had seen prior. Literally all it had to offer was a table, a chair, a naked bed frame, and an armoire tucked into the corner. There wasn't even a mirror. Overhead, the light continued to flicker, the electricity coursing through the bulb humming faintly. I nearly jumped out of my skin when a rat the size of my fist skittered out from under the bed and darted behind the armoire. Disgust coursed steadily through me and only grew the longer I stood there. I hadn't even felt comfortable putting my suitcase down on the floor.
"What are you looking at? Not used to such shitty living quarters?"
My blood ran cold as I realized that in my haste to size up where I was to stay I hadn't shut the door behind me.
"Rich bitches like you take a while to get used to the place," someone hissed from behind me. "Believe me, I've seen it."
I nearly jumped out of my skin at that voice, dry and whispery like a shedded snakeskin. My hand instinctively went to my pocket, where I knew my razor was.
I was capable of killing a person for a lot less than threatening behavior. As much as I hated myself for having the blood of another human being on my hands—conniving, greedy old crone of a mother she had been to me—I wouldn't put recreating that debacle above me me.
I turned around to come face to face with the speaker. It was a stooped woman in a tattered dress and pinafore, topped with an apron. Her clothes were all in different stages of discoloration and sodden with filth. I wondered why I hadn't heard the sound of her clogs on the floorboards as she entered. Maybe I hadn't been paying attention.
I gave her my most withering stare in a desperate attempt to conceal my fear. The glint in the woman's eyes was unsettling to say the least. I could feel her looking me up and down, sizing me up.
"And you are...?" I asked.
She completely ignored my question. "What brings someone like you to a place like this?"

The first thing I noticed about the way she spoke was that she had a noticeable accent when speaking German. What piqued my interest even further was that I thought I'd heard the accent somewhere. It sounded familiar to me. For a moment, I considered digressing and asking her where she was from, but decided against it. I barely knew this ugly old hag.
"That's a good question," I said. "I really don't know."
I had come to Germany to get away from my cousin. Why I had chosen a slum like this, I had no idea. I had a father in Pomerania, after all, living with his mistress and two children. Maybe it was because I was a penny pincher who thought her money ought to go towards better things than a place to stay. Maybe it was because I had too much pride to go and ask my father for financial help.
"You're a liar." She took a few menacing steps toward me, and I fought the urge to take a few steps back. "Nothing but a liar."
My fingers tightened around my razor, still in my pocket. I hastily scanned every inch of exposed flesh on her scrawny body—her bared wrists, her wrinkly neck—in a desperate bid to locate a weak point I could thrust my blade into.
"What's it to you?" I demanded. "I haven't accidentally walked into your apartment, have I?"
Her sparse brow furrowed. "If you walked into my apartment you would get a—"
"I could throw my hat at you and you would go down like a tree. Don't presume to tell me what I'm going to get from you."
There was a flicker of surprise in her oddly focused eyes. We stood there for a while, staring each other down. Outside, more and more people were beginning to trickle into the dimly lit hallway to their individual apartments. The woman strode across the room and shut the door with a thunderous bang.
"I knew there was something off about you when I saw you walk in here without a man."
I knew sarcasm wasn't warranted at all in this situation, but I couldn't help myself. "Ah, yes. A man. Who doesn't have one of those with them?"
She sniffed with derision. "A proper lady doesn't go anywhere without one."
"How would you know anything?" I blurted before I could stop myself. "You're no 'proper lady.'"
Now it was her turn to glare at me. "You don't know anything, girl. Nothing at all. Keep your trap shut."
There was something in her mannerism that reminded me with a pang of my housekeeper. Her blunt way of speaking smacked of the way Svetlana would talk to me; her rigid yet at ease body language mimicking here also.
Svetlana hates me. She's not "Svetlana" to me anymore. She's just another Russian living in Austria. I don't have anything to do with her anymore.
My companion noisily dragged a chair over and sat down on it with an airy grunt. I remained standing, a defensive move more than anything else, although I let go of my razor.
"You're right," she said after a moment of charged silence. "I'm not a 'proper lady'. Not anymore."
When I didn't say anything, she went on: "Before I became just 'Marie', I was 'Marie Ernestine Helena von Wedel.' Have you ever heard of the von Wedel family?"
I shook my head, resisting the urge to tell her that I wasn't even from Germany.
"Well, you're stupider than I thought." She tapped her head mockingly. "My family is known throughout Germany for being exceptional horse breeders. My father specialized in Arabian horses, you see. Dukes, counts—why, even the king of Saxony came to haggle with him for one of his thoroughbreds."
I was floored. For one thing, I didn't know nobles in Germany made a living raising horses. Secondly...
"How did someone like you end up here?" I asked.
"Now, why would I tell you that?"
"Why not?" It felt like talking to Svetlana all over again.
We fell silent again, looking at each other. I could hardly believe that this dilapidated creature in front of me was the daughter of a horse breeder, with a Von in her name no less.
"I'll tell you why I came here if you tell me your story." A plan slowly began to formulate itself in my head. Perhaps this old lady's arrival wasn't as bad as I had made it out to be at the beginning of our conversation. Maybe she was a blessing from a higher power sent to help me carve out a new beginning, to forget my old self entirely.
Marie jerked her chin dismissively. "Go on, then. Surprise me."
I took a deep breath. "My name is Helena Pottgen. I came here because my cousin tried to ship me off to a mental facility after I refused to marry him."

Im sorry if the chapter sucked half
The time I didn't even know what
I was writing the concept of this old lady came out of nowhere and I just decided to roll with it SMH

I'll turn her into something good, though.
Oh and sorry for not including the translation to the German (I was really out of it the day I published the chapter smh)
Frisch Gebackner: freshly baked