Queen Of Green Dahlia

Three

It had been four days since Edwina, the homeless woman I had met my first day in the city she later told me was called Villisca, took me in to her world of being homeless in this corrupted city. We had been calling the abandoned factory-- that Edwina said had once been used to make meat before a lawsuit shut it down-- home. After a day of panhandling and acting like we hadn't been bothering any civilians when police slowly drove by, we would find a hot dog stand to buy cheap food from and return to the decaying building to eat and rest for the night before playing rewind the next day. It wasn't perfect. Furthest thing from. The nights were getting longer and colder. We didn't make any more than ten dollars a day and most the people we begged from just lectured us about using their hard earned, tax payers money to buy booze and drugs. Edwina would stand strong, her face remaining blank as the privileged workers shouted in her face before she just started ignoring them and guiding me away to a "more civilized" place to beg.

I was grateful to Edwina for helping me out and allowing me to stay at her factory home, but the more we did this, the more I began to realize that the begging life wasn't for me. I wanted to earn my money, not just be given hand-outs just because I looked desperate. As we would travel the streets, I'd look at the local shops' windows, hoping to find a help wanted sign. Even if all the shops in this city were owned by the Black Dahlia, I needed to find a job to get some actual shelter and some real food. Sleeping under a leaky roof and eating nothing but bread, sandwiches, and hot dogs didn't seem particularly healthy.

During one of our outings, I had gotten enough money to buy a toothbrush and a handful of portable toothpaste tubes. Cleaning my teeth didn't do much to mask the stench that I hadn't washed in a while. My clothes made the stink even worse, showing that if I could smell it then it was clearly bad. I tried to clean myself using the water we'd buy, but it still didn't make me look very presentable. The last time I was able to get a good look of myself in a mirror was when I had used a rest stop restroom to brush my teeth in. My hair had become sticky and gross to the touch. My face had been covered in dirt and acne, my lips were still cracked, and it looked like I had slept in years. I was in no way the next top model, but I remembered looking way better than I did now.

Learning about Edwina was like learning about the history of a wall from the wall's perspective. Whenever I'd ask about who Edwina was before she ended up on the streets, she'd brush off my questions and tell me to focus on keeping myself alive. Her connection to the Black Dahlia was a mystery in itself, but there was a sinking feeling in my gut that they had something to do with her ending up the way she did. Whatever it was they had done to her it was obviously a sensitive subject that she wasn't about to share with some girl she only let in because of a fight over a sandwich. In response, she didn't ask me anything about myself and didn't seem to care about how or why I had runaway from home. Still, on colder nights, when I'd wake up to see Edwina shivering underneath her pile of clothing in her little corner of the room she'd sleep on, I'd take the jacket off my back and lay it down on her and spend the rest of the night moving around to warm myself up.

We hadn't heard any more news about the person who had been killed to send a message from the Black Dahlia. The scene had been taped off and anyone caught going near the alley was immediately reprimanded by the police. The body had been taken down, but from the lack of hair, teeth, and presumably organs, it didn't seem that the investigators would be able to identify the body. The gorey sight still haunted my dreams and each night I'd close my eyes and see the body I became more and more terrified and paranoid of the family. Edwina's warnings about them were starting to get to me.

After a day of begging and walking around the city to scrounge for free food or loose change, we had gone to the park to rest out feet before returning to the factory. I fell down on my back to the dewey grass, groaning from the aching in my feet. I was happy I was able to keep my teeth clean as I watched in disgust Edwina pick at her black and yellow teeth. Some of the small bones in her mouth were missing and her gums were red and bleeding. I had offered my hygienics to her, but she had refused.