Look at her; she’s a porcelain doll with never-ending milk legs all stapled to the bed, thirteen years young with forty-eight years suffocating her figure. He’s right up to her baby lips, offering cigarette breath and grinding his stubble on her cheeks, it reminds her of gravel and she closes her eyelids as it falls across her neck, inhaling the cloud of dust.

The curtains are draped across the sky, dried blood red casting shadows she can’t tell the ends of. A dim flicker of a light and maybe a filter of moonshine illuminate the crevasses of his eyelids, forehead and awry mouth. His skin tastes of sweat and earth.

She was with her father in the afternoon, sharing his eyes and wearing the yellow dress he bought her. He was a quaint man who studied birds and told her she looked like a canary; he bought a voluminous cage (from the very same balding man he sold her to) and kept her in there at nighttime.

And now, three oh clock in the morn, the balding man has her; he’s filling her eardrums with his panting and his guttural wheezing. He’s filling up the gaps she never knew she had and she’s aching and fluttering between the imaginary and the unpalatable- her happy place and this smutty one star hotel room. She can count his teeth on one hand.

But she’s never scared; she’s rarely anything but grey eyes and just maybe a subdued murmur. She never smiles, guffaws or frowns. It’s easier this way.
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She feels twenty-two, truth is she stopped counting and thinking long ago (she abated most things, but thank god she never stopped breathing). To a foreigner she is long ebony hair and a short skirt. She is stunted pubescent hips and willowy bones.  She is a legal child. To her the foreigners are cheap wine, deep aches and money; oh the money.

The street is her vociferous, bright-lights home. Without traffic the world is too quiet and sometimes the voices creep in. She knows the other girls, she hears them talking- red lipstick on yellow teeth- their voices scratch at her ears but she never really replies. She fingers the fabric of her shirt, staring out but never really seeing; letting the streetlights haze into a myriad of moons.

They always choose her. Together the girls are a garden of Fescennine flowers on the sidewalk and hers always seems to catch the most sunlight, drawing in men with her air of anonymity and her baby face.

” She’s the daughter I always wanted to fuck” He wore a gray suit and underneath a swelling of a stomach, he came close to her as he said it, spit trickling down from her bare shoulders. She didn’t avert her eyes until he slapped her. Hard and rough until she saw nothing but traffic-light red. She stared vacantly until he pulled her along the sidewalk like a dog, emaciated with sleepless bruises beneath her eyes.

He could have shattered her, heaving his weight and falling against her like hail. She was so small beneath him, such a tiny thing you’d hardly see her there at all. She hushed her eyelids and felt her body dream of thorns, she felt the blood slow in crushed veins and she felt the stabbing in her stomach, time and time and time again until he collapsed. A mass of sweaty skin in folds; hiding thick flesh and crippled bones. She stole air from the outside and let the wintry wind tear through the leaves and rumple her hair.

She had luke-warm tea and burnt toast for breakfast and then she had nothing once more.

In the afternoon she’s drowning in smoke. Listening to the beggars plead with wispy voices and watching the foreigners feign care with clinks of metal. There are signs down and beyond the road, all screaming for attention with ostentatious colours. She leans with her back against a concrete wall, collecting glances without effort and sighing clouds of fog. She licks her cracked lips and traces the jutting lines of her pelvis. Someone passes, he imagines lying her flat in ink and then pressing her on paper; a skeletal stamp. He shrugs and she never lifts her eyes.

That night she sleeps alone in a crowded room. She inhales urine, sweat and vomit but doesn’t notice. She still tastes the metallic bitterness of her lipstick along with the salt water. She’s had so much practice no one can tell she is crying any longer (would anyone care?).

She embraces her used frame, curling into a ball and sucking the tips of her thumb. She escapes in her mind- somewhere, anywhere, nowhere- and drifts until she forgets that she’s just a doll with a pulse and a vacancy, and that’s all she’ll ever be.