This is a ran­domly pub­lished excerpt from a WIP I have had sit­ting in the back­ground of my own per­sonal writ­ing career for the last few months. This piece isn’t actu­ally in the WIP, it was writ­ten in an inspi­ra­tional moment.

Per­haps it will fit into the story some­where — and it cer­tainly sticks to the char­ac­ter in both — but for now, I thought I might just show it to see what peo­ple think (it might even be a sort of affir­ma­tion to ensure that I am not totally with­out tal­ent, which at the moment, I have been con­sid­er­ing as a possibility.)

A sub­tle hue descended on the res­i­dents of Trin­ity Cor­ners. Mil­lions in pres­ence, the city sat like a bea­con to the most noto­ri­ous of England’s under­world. Schem­ing crim­i­nals and those with mor­bid curios­ity found the area to be a haven from the all too pry­ing eyes of the law. In this day and age – the mid twenty-first cen­tury – the author­i­ties and law­break­ers lived by a bal­anced code: don’t spill over the city-line and the county wouldn’t ask questions.

Not all of the laws bro­ken were so sig­nif­i­cant of course. Some­one had to cater to the needs of those who dodged death at their door­way and that fell to the Sunny Girls; the hook­ers of Trin­ity, given name by the road they did busi­ness on.

Dark­ness clouded her view, but in the end­less black a pres­ence could be felt as close as breathe. “You are dif­fer­ent. Look for answers.”

Star­tled awake, May turned her eyes to the flash­ing neon 8:30 beside her. Silenc­ing the alarm, she dropped back and stared at the ceil­ing with a sigh. The same dream – or con­vo­luted night­mare – plagued her every night and no amount of per­sis­tence from her tested cures: be it warm milk, a com­fort­able blan­ket or sleep­ing pills, could make the stranger’s voice go away. And so she lay, like always, won­der­ing what the hell was going on and what the hell she was sup­posed to do to change it.

Now the clock had ran five min­utes and unless she wanted to feel the wrath of Dou­glas, May had to get ready for her day. Pulling back her bed­ding she ambled from the mat­tress with lit­tle ele­gance and approached a cur­tained win­dow. Yank­ing back the ratty mate­r­ial, the dark­ness of the descend­ing sun set upon May’s face as she curled a lip and rubbed her eyes. “Morn­ing beau­ti­ful,” she mur­mured. With a slow approach, she took to the bath­room and twisted the shower faucet. Had she lived else­where, per­haps the Nightin­gale Heights, May could have called aloud for her shower to begin. A com­puter chip embed­ded in the wall some­where might rec­og­nize the com­mand and begin a sooth­ing bathing… per­haps with some kind of auto­matic soap dis­penser. This was not the case how­ever, and so the faucet span and the water trick­led from the badly ser­viced tank three-floors below.

May gri­maced; this was not how she had envi­sioned her future.

(Image: Hooker — shrines)