By Chloe Aiko Stark
The girls tilled the soil whenever they wove their pricked fingers around the flat collars of businessmen. They kept it warm with their own bodies for ignoble days of burying, poured over with primrose by the good sisters who kept them still. They had never to pay for taking a room, these girls that liked to fall sick in the dead of night, before winter. Whatever had gotten into them needed only to be pressed upon by a strict thumb bearing the reason of the divine and excised, thrashed around the laundry room when nobody was looking. A gown from dull needles stained and swallowed, they would have to learn the hard way. Men that visited and looked straight into them were never clean and held conversation like fools, so the girls tended to their wounds with the skin of their own pallid legs that flailed. Take the animals to a cleaver and see that they do the same.
Hold her hair up while she suffers to please you, she can do it herself in the hall. Her hand slipping down the shaft, the sisters should have taken him out of her. She makes less of herself, expels the taste onto the floor so that he can burn holes into the fabric and she can tear her fingernails across carpeted walls, turn her hands on herself and suppose that she may have to pray some more.
The fences were long and sloughed off the unwanted. They were the only beautiful things on the property, painted white at the end of every year. They covered an overgrown field of weeds and insects that bit death into their prey, the posts were tied taut. Nobody in town had ever to see the ashen face of the home for fallen women, its curtains always drawn behind iron handles. The brick laid without care and dressed in smoke and oil spores. There was a spire that rammed its stake into the skies and a crow impaled by the wing. All of the girls knew the place and went there to see where it tended to happen, where the others had gone once they had made up their minds.
Drown acts of disobedience in the basin. Wash flesh under hot water until it is tender enough to fall off the bone. Hold a caucus for morality, and then tell the girls that they will never see heaven. Drip coffee over their spent heads and have them give their bodies over while they bleed. The ways of the righteous and the lessons in hell and how to avoid it, how could they when they were already there.
The girls told tales under the covers after the sisters went to bed. They parted their lips to warm milk and rolled its sweet froth over their teeth. They crossed their ankles and wore their arms around bent knees to say where they ran off to when the rain swept over the bank, others conspired through the thin cotton sheets. Feathers were plucked from a swollen mattress and sown into pillows to be picked up by the younger girls and tossed to the ones who were quiet, they tried to draw smiles over their tired mouths. How it was to move through the city when the dark had settled and the winds came soft, what the earth felt like after the rain fell down the sloping roofs. The doors locked after a long walk home just for a slip down the porch to soil their pantyhose. A week of wages out the window. A loose cannon and a letter from the church where some slept hand in hand, angels that they were and would become.
Chloe Aiko Stark is a writer and student.