.:House of Cards:. [Open]
Apr 20, 2013 19:29:11 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Apr 20, 2013 19:29:11 GMT -5
[/color] have been parched by the sun that cracks skin overhead. The good dry up and die long before they turn to dust. It’s the sickening that stay.[/color] A good many don’t play by the rules; they press limits that don’t nobody need to do. But humanity has a funny way of bringing out the worst in people. All too easy to cut a cord. Simple as slitting a throat[/color], games’ll show you that. Parents do they best to make sure none wind up like the evil ones from the upper districts—little soulless monsters, they is[/color] —but only so much you can do in a world where just getting by is survival. Hope fades thin when the sun cracks it to dust. [/color]Jolene WashburnI feel numb most of the time,
The more I get the higher,
I'll climb, and I will wonder why,
I get dark only,
To shine.
The good men and women of the district know well enough to let sleeping dogs lie. These are folk that were raised better. It is that their spirits
Jolene Washburn was never one to slide away from an ounce of freedom. Where that came from she couldn’t say; sometimes it was in the form of being out late and running wild. Sometimes it was seeing bad men do bad things. Because she kept to herself, all of seventeen-and-a-half, the choices were hers to make. Why do I got to be treated like a child,[/color] She’d ruminate,If I know the bad that men can do?[/color] Was something fragile about all of it. The heat of the spring had come out in full force that evening. She walked along the path toward town, ambling her way toward a Saloon. Whistles were not uncommon to her ears, though she didn’t turn her head to pay them mind. She’d rather play by her own rules, seeing as a generous as men could be, there were always favors to be done.[/color] If anything, Jolene knew that the man that was perched at the top could just as well be the one at the bottom the next day. Dust to dust, and all that bullshit.[/color]
She’d found that hope was a stupid thing to have. Girls often cried about their lot in the lower district, where life was uneasy and stomachs went about growling. No,[/color] she reasoned, The worst thing a girl could have is hope.[/color] Jolene was a Washburn, she was from a family of next to no means—though they weren’t no pig farmers—but it hadn’t stopped them from living. But it wasn’t hope that paid the bills or fed the horses. And it for damn sure wasn’t hope that got them out of bed in the morning. Just about the only thing Jolene was certain of was that hard work, more than any silly notion of fate or hope or whatever stupid girls wanted to believe, that was the thing that kept her going. Whether or not one moved past all the sorry shit that happened was another.
The light flickered from the window of the saloon, and Jolene stopped to push back her hair. One of the few things she took pride in, she only fussed with the tangled mess to make sure there wasn’t any remnants of fieldwork left in it. To be looked at, ah, now there was her real aim.[/color] ‘Cause as far as she could go in this District—which by all accounts weren’t no great distance—as a girl, she only ever got anywhere when she used all that had been given to her by her family. She wasn’t unclever. She wasn’t unpretty. And she wasn’t content to wind up on some boy’s arm, standing in the background to cheer him on to victory. She would rather have slit her own throat then and there.
Tonight she weren’t looking for a way out of this world, but a way in.[/color] Maybe there wasn’t anything exciting behind the swinging doors; maybe there was a whole other world waiting for her. She didn’t know nothing about much—not unless she’d experienced it. History was the best teacher. And Jolene was anything but a shrinking violet. No, the allure of the dark, the way her heart raced when she did just exactly as she shouldn’t have, now there was fun.[/color] Her dour grandmamma had dubbed it her second spirit. [/color] The little boy brother that had died first, he weren’t ready to go from this world just yet. Little Jolene was enough spirit for two; he still pulsed and pulled her. And this yearning for freedom was more than any old phase of young adulthood.
She didn’t press the doors just yet. Instead she drew out a single cigarette and slid it between her long, bony fingers. She curled the thing to her mouth and searched for a match. Finding none, her face distorted into a frown. Shit.[/color] She leaned over the wooden beam where the men hitched their horses and gave a little laugh to herself. Her red hair fell down, obscuring her face. She didn’t listen to the sound of another’s approach, only watched the stretch of shadows as they danced along the ground. “Got a light,” She whispered out, not looking whoever it was in the eye. Better not to waste her time if they didn’t.[/color]
[/blockquote][/size][/justify]