Panacea

She lived in a narrow alley that almost no one visited. She used to live in a sad excuse of a town, but she left it behind — and really, she didn’t like to think of it. She liked to pretend that she’d run away from home to find a world just dying to take her in.

Her name was Penelope Woodham, and she had been homeless for years. She once lived in Tinney-on-Sea, a pitiful little place with one cramped school and a dingy bowling alley. It was surrounded almost entirely by trees, making the park in the centre of the place quite useless. All it had was a few trees and a bench or two, essentially making it a smaller version of the forest around town. But, useless as it was, the people went there anyway.

And when she thought of her old home, all she would think of was how she missed showering. She could get food well enough on her own and had plenty of blankets (which she threw together to make a sort of bed), but god did she miss water pressure.

But again, she didn’t like to think of Old Tinney. Or her escape from it, as happy as she was when she did it. So instead, she sometimes thought of her mother — whose life was apparently incomplete without stragglers walking through her door. She found that she needed very little human contact. Her mother always needed to talk; she really only needed to think. She didn’t know why (or how, really) she got on this topic so often. She just tried to change the subject.

Penny thought about her mother even less than she thought about Old Tinney. When she got on the nostalgia train, it was usually because her hair was greasy and she wanted to shower.

Groggily, she thought that she would have to do just that some time soon. She would have to break into some place. She really was starting to smell.

But until then, she would be fine. The blankets had more or less stayed in place as she slept — were they more comfortable than they’d been when she turned in? — and she was still a little sleepy. In the distance she could hear someone groaning, but she didn’t spend a minute thinking about whether she should help. It was probably Carl, the stupid jackass.

He probably just got his hand caught inside his jacket again.

-


She awoke at dusk. The groaning, the half-remembered groaning from so many hours before, seemed to have increased. She wondered for a moment whether Carl had recruited some idiots. There always seemed to be a gaggle of people following Carl around. She never did know why. He was possibly the biggest idiot she ever knew.

She pushed her blankets off and into a pile and hid them behind a garbage can. She pulled out a small wooden club, which she had stolen from some house years before. The thing looked like it might have belonged to a miniature caveman, but it was useful anyway. It was the only thing she could always carry that could also cause some damage.

Penny got up quickly and crept out of her alley-turned-home. It felt like there was a hole in her gut. She needed food.

She thought about hitting a big house just up the street: it had plenty of food, there was usually some money lying around, and they rarely tried to figure out who had broken in. Sometimes Penny wondered if they even knew that someone had broken in. But she had just gone there a few days ago and thought it would be a bad idea to go there again so soon.

And so she headed off the other way. She felt a little bad about stealing from the people down on High Street. Most of them were struggling as it was, and she didn’t really want to contribute to that. Whenever she was feeling down about it, though, she’d tell herself that she had it a hell of a lot worse than they did and that she was entitled to something in the world.

And when that didn’t work, she would think about the name of the street instead. How High Street became the poor street, she never did know. Of course, the place wasn’t the city’s slums, but she always thought of ‘High’ as in rich — the high and mighty and all that crap. It was a little ironic, Penny thought, that people with low incomes lived on High Street.

When she finally made it to the street, darkness had fallen. She walked straight to the home of the wealthiest family there and trailed around back. She thought she might have to pick the lock again, but the back door wasn’t even fully shut. She knew a teenage boy lived there — he must have sneaked out. The amateur.

She pushed the door open slowly, thanking every god she knew that it never squeaked.

Penny rushed into the kitchen (just down the hall and on the left) and pulled open the fridge. There were a few slices of pizza at the front, which she grabbed greedily and nearly inhaled. Figuring the two would suffice for the next little while, she moved onto the pantry. There were usually some granola bars at this place and she wouldn’t mind having a few for tomorrow. She didn’t plan on taking much more, but there was a very delicious nut mix and a couple single serving boxes of Corn Pops, and she figured taking it now would be a lot easier than taking it a few days from now.

She stuffed them quickly into her coat — it had huge pockets. It wasn’t the most sanitary thing, as she’d found it in a dumpster. She grabbed more and more, and admittedly, she saw very little wrong with her current lifestyle. Sure, she was smelly and dirty, and the only money she made was through petty crime, but she actually didn’t mind. It wasn’t too bad, if you avoided the drug users and thieves.

Penny Woodham thought very little about crime. She didn’t think that more police or vigilance or taking the high road could stop it, because police and vigilance and the good ol’ moral high road never really stopped her. She didn’t think that it could be stopped. In her crime-numbed mind, it was a fact of life, and facts of life tend to be too hard to fight.

Her coat pockets weren’t big enough to fit the cereal. It was a bit of a disappointment. She thought it’d all squeeze in there somehow, and she really didn’t want to carry it. But she decided that she would have to when she heard the footsteps. They were slow and shuffling — whoever was strolling around the house didn’t seem to realise there was an intruder.

Unfortunately for her, the hall was the only way to exit the house. She darted to the corner and hid in the shadows, hoping the person would just get a drink and leave. The stooping figure entered the room, feeling around in the dark. She stuck close to the walls and walked to the kitchen door. Fortunately for her, the man didn’t turn on the lights.

She tried her hardest to creep past him — noting that he smelled even worse than she did — but something told him she was there. Maybe he had noticed her scent just as she noticed his.

“Naaaaarrgh,” the man yelled, though rather lazily.

She didn’t think, not even for a second. She didn’t think about his slurred speech or his terrible odour. She simply whipped out the little club and bashed him on the head.

Normally she would have left it at that, as the hit was enough to bring him to the floor. But his hand grazed her breast as he fell and he sort of squeezed it as he went. If he didn’t do that, she would have run out of the place — but she hit him on the head again for good measure. She thought she heard a squelching sound as the club hit his skull. And then ran out.

She raced out of the house and down the street and into the alley. And she hid behind her dumpster.

She worried that she might have killed the guy. Didn’t something splatter after that second hit? Robbery was one thing, but murder? No, she couldn’t afford to be a murderer. Sure, she didn’t really have all that much too lose, but she thought she’d prefer the streets to the cells. At least she had some freedom on the streets.

She wrapped the blankets around herself, covering her head with the nicest smelling one.

She hoped if she did kill the guy that they couldn’t tie her to it.