Status: work in progress!

Genevieve

001

post-traumatic stress disorder [noun]

1. a condition of persistent mental and emotional stress occurring as a result of injury or severe psychological shock, typically involving disturbance of sleep and constant vivid recall of the experience, with dulled responses to others and to the outside world.


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Gina’s lips are pursed around a lit Marlboro Gold; three-thousand dollar lips plumped with collagen and painted harlot red. She doesn’t even bother to touch the cigarette anymore. She just inhales and exhales, clouds of smoke curling from her nostrils like dragon’s breath, and all the while she is plucking her eyebrows in front of the bathroom mirror in the presidential suite of the Heathman Hotel and telling me in her thick brooklyn accent, the cigarette wiggling between two rows of perfect teeth, that she is on her last end, that she has had it with this goddamned hotel, and that Esperanza better bring her her vodka soda pronto or god help her she will send the bitch packing.

I am lying on the chaise near the bathtub, pretending to read a magazine, and I am only half-listening to what she is saying. Instead I’m concentrating on the sky outside, at the pigeons flying on the horizon, which are now only black specks against a sunset backdrop of orange and pink. I am wondering where they’re going off to, and I am thinking that if I were a bird, I would fly as far away from here as possible and never look back.

“Genevieve, are you listening to me?”

Gina looks at me, clearly pissed, but then again I don’t care. I nod once in her direction before turning my head back to the window.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“I said that Daddy’s bringing guests tonight.” She says, wincing slightly as she plucks another hair.

“And?”

And,” she pauses, throwing me an annoyed glance. “He’s making a big deal with some gentlemen from the East Side, so we need to be there.”

I frown, but I don’t reply. Truth be told, I’m not in the mood to help my father swindle his way through another deal. I’ve had a bad day, my head hurts, and all I’m really looking forward to is taking a long, hot shower and going to bed early.

“Tell him I’ve got the flu.” I say, flipping another page.

“You said that last time -”

“Then tell him I’m dead.” I reply dryly.

Gina scoffs once; a harsh, mordant sound, then pops open a new tube of mascara and starts poking at her eyelashes.

“I don’t understand why you have to be so difficult.” she says in a voice simply dripping with pretension. "It's not like you haven't done this before."

“What I don’t understand,” I reply, rolling my eyes, “is how you manage to enjoy sucking cock for hotel rooms.”

I know I've gone too far as soon as I say it. There’s a long pause, and when I look up from my magazine Gina is staring at me, and she looks like she could kill me if I say another word. I stare back at her, impassive, cold. I know she knows I'm not going to apologize.

“I don’t,” Gina hisses after a beat. With angry, trembling hands, she slips a small plastic bag out of her purse and dumps the contents onto the countertop. “I do it because it's my job, Genevieve. Those men, may I remind you, are all we have.

I watch in stubborn silence as Gina flicks the stub of her cigarette to the floor, sprinkling ashes on the polished marble. “Without them,” she continues hurriedly, “we’d have no money. Nothing.”

Retrieving a Platinum Express Card from her wallet, Gina cuts the powder into thick white lines. And as she separates her stash with expert precision, her face suddenly becomes so shockingly blank; almost as if she hasn’t felt anything for years, as if she’s been long dead.

“We’d be homeless again. Or even worse...”

With practiced fingers, she rolls a crisp twenty into a thin tube, then leans down to sniff up the contents. Her long, blonde hair hangs heavy around her face, and when she resurfaces, her nostrils are frosted with white and her eyes are impossibly wide, like she’s seen God.

“... Dead in the ground, just like Mama.

Her voice shakes, either from the drugs or from the gravity of her own words. I’m not sure which.

I know she’s right, and suddenly the thought of all of this: our hotel room, our life now, the family business, even the clothes off my back; as temporary and changeable is so overwhelmingly frightening to me that I have to press my forehead to the cold, hard edge of the bathtub and will myself to calm down. Almost as if in a dream I feel myself falling, and I am choking for air, seeing flashes of street gutters and broken glass and alleyways at night, toothless men with hungry eyes, the wet sounds of sobbing. Caked blood between pale thighs. Dogs barking in the darkness.

Seconds, maybe hours pass, until I feel cool hands on my shoulders, until I hear my sister say to me, “Genevieve, I’m so sorry, I'm so sorry, it’s okay, you’re going to be okay.”

“You’re right, you’re right, I'm going to be okay.” I say, repeating her, feeling myself about to fall apart at the seams.

Her arms slip around my waist, and she holds me tight against her, and I feel empty, and I am homesick for a home I've never had. And right now I know that I’ll do anything to make this dark place disappear. I’ll sit on their laps, and touch them in the worst way, as long as Daddy gets his paycheck; as long as I never have to see those alleyways again.

Anything. Anything for the family business.
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excited to be writing my first story on mibba!