jackal kennedy | D2

In the mornings, I'd sit with my mother and watch her get ready. The bathroom was in the back of our small apartment, where there were no windows. Sometimes you could hear your neighbor flushing through the walls. It used to gross me out, to know their bathroom visits so well. My mother said not to complain. She loved to tell me not to all the time. "It could be worse," she'd say, "You could be living in the gutters with the vermin." I'd sit on the toilet lid and watch as she applied her make-up. She always looked really happy when she was getting ready to go out. She'd put on red lipstick and say it was her armor and then curl her hair just like the lady on the matchbook covers in her wallet.

My mother reminded me of a movie starlet. I think she could have been. Her hair was long and lovely, light blonde in colour. It fell down her back and was beautiful. When I was little, I'd asked her where my own hair came from. It was not like her's at all, jet black, and pin-straight. She'd laugh, her red lips making a surprised 'o' shape, and say that I had my father's hair, duh. Like I should've known that by then.

She was young too, must have been only seventeen when she had me. When I was six, she was twenty-three, a child playing an adult. I didn't think about that much at the time though, I don't think that kids really think much. There's too much to experience to think so everything from that time comes in images, slow reels of film that spark through my head at three in the morning when I should be sleeping but I have a cigarette between my lips instead.

Anyway, she wasn't a great mom but she'd still take me to the park sometimes, one white-gloved hand holding on tightly to mine. We'd always walk far, almost all the way across the district until there was a lot less garbage littering the streets and the shop windows were prettier. She'd push me into the playgrounds there among the posh, my hair combed nicely and a crisply ironed shirt. She'd laugh with the other moms but always be prettier, glow more than all of them until she would catch a man's eye.

Then we'd walk home and she'd have an address in her little notebook and we'd stop and get something from the street food vendors as a treat. I remember those days, at least one or two of them, even if the rest faded out a couple of years ago.

I never knew that my mom was a user until it was too late.

I was eight years old the morning I woke up and the apartment was cold. A baby was crying a couple of doors down. His name was Joey and he was pretty fresh. Mom had sent me over with a basket of fruit for them when they'd come back from the hospital. Everyone in the building liked my mom because she knew everything about them and cared. She never forgot a single birthday.

That morning I woke up and the apartment was cold, joey was crying and there was a popped bag of popcorn just sitting in the microwave. Mom liked the sweet and salty kind you could get with little chunks of caramel. She was sat in front of the television and the volume was muted on a rerun of some games and her arm was hanging off of the couch, her lips pale.

After that, I went to live with my aunt. She had a house on a street a few rows up from my mom's apartment but she didn't like me, she never has. I was eight years old and only had a suitcase of my things but she didn't like the way that I existed, taking up space in her home when her children needed to eat first. She didn't like me because I had pin-straight black hair and looked 'just like that evil man' but I didn't know who that was.

She let me stay as long as I agreed to do chores and then she didn't care what I did with the rest of my time. School was an option for me but I didn't want to start at a new one so I didn't. I'd walk the street up and down quietly instead, hands shoved into my pockets, people watching. Sometimes I'd write words down on little scraps of paper and push them down into my pockets, poetry, but for my eyes only.

There was this one kid, he was older than me, he'd sit there and sing for hours, a little hat in front of him and he never minded if I sat with him. I remember the first time I just crouched nearby, listening for hours. I can't remember why I'd been scared to approach him. Maybe I thought he'd see my bruises and think I was weak, I don't know.

The memory of him gets to be hazy often, I'm good at just forgetting things from around that time but also part of me just thinks that I made him up, that I just really needed one good thing in my life at the time so I invented someone who actually wanted me around because one day I went looking for him and he wasn't there, just an empty alley but for an old mattress that we used to lay on at night together when I was too scared to go home.

Dylan says that I probably forgot a lot because my aunt got me on the head one too many times, no surprise there, she hated me. Liked to tell me all about how I'd ruined her baby sister and I was good for nothing and I didn't mind it because I knew that she was just mad but christ did it fucking hurt sometimes. Sometimes, I'd just crawl up to bed to hold myself together but other nights I'd creep out of that old house and go find the boy with the beautiful voice and he'd hold up his blanket and we'd huddle together for warmth.

You couldn't see many stars through the parallel lines that made up the top of the alley but it hadn't mattered much because I didn't mind falling asleep when I was with him. It's hard now to remember his face but I'll never forget his voice, singing me softly to sleep. Still kind of wonder what happened to him, the logical part of me knows that he got swallowed by the underbelly of the district, that he was probably long dead, but I like to believe that he followed his dreams, made it big or whatever.

Somebody's gotta have wishful thinking in this hellhole.

Maybe I believed in pretty things when I was little but that went away fast. The first time my aunt kicked me out, I was twelve with nowhere to go. She said if I wasn't working then I wasn't useful to her so if I wanted my bed back, I'd better get a job but no one was gonna hire a kid. So I found a mattress in an alley and slept on that. I thought about the kid with the pretty voice again and wondered if he was doing better than me or if he was just as lost and I kind of hoped that he wondered about me sometimes too.

But I didn't think about me, how could anyone else?

That first time, my aunt let me come back home a few days later. My cousin had gotten upset about it I guess so maybe I owed her, dunno. Things had stopped bothering me at some point in there, the futility of feeling anything at all dawning on me at maybe too young an age. I realized that she just wanted the benefit of tesserae on the table for her kids, not that I really saw a lot of that. I remember feeling so tired of it all that I kind of hoped I'd get reaped.

Nothing sounds more fucked up than that sort of wishful thinking but the idea of a comfortable bed and a week of luxury before dying? Come on.

She kicked me out again a few weeks later anyway after the reaping and the benefit of having me under her roof was gone and after that, I just started walking, feet taking me away from that neighbourhood altogether and the mattress in the alley. I decided that I really must have made that boy up, it was a better option than what must have really happened to him. He probably died from exposure one night and that was that, no such thing as a happy ending. That'd be the way I'd be going to if I didn't figure something out fast.

Dylan came along pretty fast, I met him one night when I was begging in front of a club, hat pulled open in front of me, just another homeless kid in a district where the line was so visible. I guess he saw something in me I didn't know I had and he took me home, hands on my shoulders, my waist, my chest.

It isn't so bad, not anymore. I grew up with it anyway, my mom was always letting guys go in and out for a couple of dollars and I don't judge her for it, she was just keeping us fed and in a home. So I see it that way too, when Dylan takes me out and tells me my mark, I go, no complaining. I'm under his thumb but I put myself there. I get fed, have a warm place to sleep and he beats me less than my aunt.

Things turned out I guess.