There's a whore on the bed.
She's sleeping right now and the light from the corner window just traces her shoulder across the pale green plaster of the wall. She looks broken, lying there, with a sheet just covering her thin body. She looks dead.
She's not dead, though, just sleeping. The sheet continues to faintly rise and fall with her slow breathing. She sleeps, the kind of sleep that only the truly fulfilled can fall into. The sleep of the completed. The sleep of the done. She is done, for now, she is finished. The twenty-four hour lifetime that she lives daily is at an end, she is sleeping and in her sleeping she has died. Tomorrow she will wake up with a cry, the scream of a child being born, a sobbing so full of pain and anguish that only a mother could love it. Tomorrow she will wake up guiltless, without memory or conscience. She will wake up to a new lifetime. A new twenty-four hour life span with endless potential for experience, for love or for pain, for good or for evil. She will not wake up a whore. She will wake up a woman, free to do as she pleases, free to be whatever she will be. Tomorrow she will decide, for the first time, to be a whore. She will decide to turn her first trick in a four dollar hotel on the corner of Ninth and Laramie, across the street from a Chinese grocery.
Above the bed, above the sleeping whore on the bed, tacked to the wall by a three foot length of bailing wire, is a photograph. The photograph is mounted on a square of plywood. The plywood was wrapped in duct tape, the duct tape was in turn stapled sporadically to the plywood. It's hard to say which suffered more in this relationship. Covering most of this singular upholstery, excepting a five inch border, is an eight by twelve black and white photograph of a railroad track, taken from approximately twelve feet above the track. The track runs precisely even, from left to right, across the photograph. The photograph sits precisely even, mounted squarely, across the plywood. Running around the plywood, holding the photograph flush, is a thin copper wire. The copper wire is the only color, besides varying grays, on the entire object. The light from the corner window, the same light that traces the whore's breathing shadow, gleams peculiar from the edges of the wires.
From the bed it looks like stars.
There's a whore on the bed.
There's a whore on the bed and in three hours she will wake up a little girl. She will wake up a woman. She will wake up a crone. She will wake up to her next life, whatever that may be. She will begin it as she has began each life since she can remember: she will call out to her mother. She will cry out to her mother and then she will wash her face in the bathroom sink, she will have some toast, she will decide how she wants to live her life. Today she was a whore. It was a filthy life, a life filled with instance, a life filled with circumstance. It was an exciting life, a life filled with loathing, a life filled with want. It was a desperate life, a life filled with attempts, a life filled with grunt and gasp. It was an interesting way to spend a lifetime.
Tomorrow she will be a whore. Some would say this is a poor choice for a lifestyle, a poor choice for a life ... but everyone gets one mistake.
There's a whore on the bed.
The sheet rustles starchly as she turns over, the light from the corner window outlines her chin on the pale green plaster wall. She looks broken, lying there, she looks dead.
She's not dead, though, just sleeping.
Dying.
