Fiction Series
The Corner of Something and Nothing
Chapter 2 — Streets of Broken Dreams
There is no saving grace in this city. Not for anyone except the wealthy elite. I was born and raised here, and my parents owned a little bakery a few blocks away. It’s gone now, like most of the other small businesses that once thrived in the neighborhood.
It’s never been what you’d call a nice place, but it was decent until the gangs started to move in, bringing violence and drugs with them. Little by little people started moving away and businesses started closing. Not my parents though. They’d built their whole life here and were determined to stick it out. My dad would always say that the police would get a handle on things and the neighborhood would get back to the way it was.
Then the police stopped coming. I guess they got tired of being shot at and gave us up as a lost cause. After that, things deteriorated almost overnight. Drugs ran rampant and violent crime became a normal part of everyday life. Drive-bys in broad daylight. Drug deals on nearly every corner. It’s only gotten worse since I’ve been out here.
I never wanted this life. I was a normal kid with normal, hard-working parents. I was going places. I had big plans. Everyone says that and some may even achieve it, but for most people, it’s just a dream and then you wake up. My dream was swallowed by a nightmare and I’m afraid I’m never waking up.
It’s been three years now, but it feels like an eternity. It all happened so quickly after my father was murdered in a robbery four years ago. My mother gave up completely after his death and died of a heart attack eight months later. It was the grief that killed her and no one will ever convince me otherwise.
I was sixteen at the time and clueless about what to do. Nobody even came to check on me. I have no family here, and when they came and got moms body, they just took it and left. There wasn’t even a funeral to my knowledge. The bank took the house and I took to the streets. What the hell else was I supposed to do? This neighborhood is the only life I’ve ever known. No one ever gave me a second thought.
I crashed wherever I could. I still had a couple of acquaintances around. Awful people really, but a sofa under a roof beat the hell out of concrete under the stars. I made it three whole weeks before depression got the best of me and I slit my wrists in a stranger's bathtub. I'd gone over with my “friend” Jess. It was her dealer's house.
I sat on the floor in the living room while Jess went to the bedroom to pay and get her stuff. Heroin was her drug of choice. A couple of hours passed and I went to use the bathroom. Suicide had not crossed my mind until I saw the razor on the sink. I botched it because I was afraid of how bad it would hurt.
Jess and her dealer found me a while later. Sitting in the bathtub, wrists bleeding and sobbing. Jess freaked out and screamed for him to call an ambulance. All he did was laugh.
“Ain’t no ambulance coming down here and you know it,” he snarled. “Hell, she’s barely bleeding. She don’t really wanna die, just wants attention.”
He was right, I did want attention, and I’d find it in all the wrong ways. I’ll spare you a bunch of the gory details, but soon after, I was drinking and shooting up with Jess on a daily basis. I didn’t have any money to pay for my booze and drugs, so the gang found work for me. That’s how I ended up on the street. A prostitute making money for the lowest forms of life on the planet. Selling my body to support my addiction, and to keep them from putting a bullet in my head.
They smacked me around from time to time, but nothing too aggressive. No one was gonna pay for sex with a girl who was bruised and bloodied. It was a scare tactic and it worked.
They put me on a corner a couple of blocks over from the “house”. Right in front of a tiny abandoned church where someone had condescendingly graffitied the words “Jesus can’t save you now” on the front door. I think it was their way of reminding me, on a nightly basis, that I was their property.
So here I am, three years later, a nineteen-year-old that was once full of all the hopes and dreams that little girls have. These streets destroyed those dreams before I even had time to comprehend what was happening. No hope left and no escape, except death, and it wasn’t coming soon enough.
Last night, I was standing a few blocks from the church, waiting for a trick with my “bodyguard” Tap. That’s what they called themselves. The gang members that watched the girls and collected the money, were “bodyguards”. Anyway, a car pulls up and stops. This middle-aged guy, quite handsome really, leans over and asks how much for oral. Tap told him and he passed the money out the window.
As I was getting in Tap said, “Just drive around the block a few times till she’s finished and drop her off right back here.” He made sure the man saw the gun in his waistband. Then he turned and walked back toward the cover of the building as we drove off.
As we turned the corner at the end of the block the man said to me, “Put your seatbelt on.” I looked at him, puzzled. “My name is Father Jésus Carlló, from St. Anthony’s downtown, you’re safe now.” With that, he floored it, and we went rocketing down the street.
“They’ll kill me,” I screamed. “They’ll kill you.”
He smiled. “By the time he realizes we’re gone and gets his buddies and a car, we’ll be halfway back to St. Anthonys. They won’t come that far from here.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” I half-whispered. “I have no family. My whole life was here.”
“What’s your name?”
“Annalyse,” I replied.
“Annalyse, you got a long road ahead of you, but you can make it. There’s plenty of help where I’m taking you,” he smiled broadly.
I relaxed a little. I thought about my mom and dad, and how much it would mean to them that I had gotten out of there. I had to make it, for them, and myself.
As we whizzed past the little church, I looked over and read the writing on the door one last time. “Jesus can’t save you now”! A smile crept across my face as I turned and looked at Father Jésus. “Well,” I said out loud, “He can definitely save one of us.”