The night wrapped up around four in the morning. Seven hours: nine blowjobs and five rounds of intercourse. Of those five, one was a virgin whose father was paying—he insisted on watching, which earned uncomfortable looks from both myself and his son, but he was the one paying—and another two insisted on anal. As a general rule I refuse access to the “back door” when it’s requested, but most of the Johns who came our way already knew that, provided they were willing to pay, nothing was off limits. T-Built’s promise: “you pay; they’ll play.” Granted, I’ll luck out every now and again and wind up with a customer who doesn’t know about T-Built or his whores’ policy, and on those occasions I can usually—USUALLY!—get out of taking it up the butt. Of the two who insisted, however, one was already in the know—I could tell by the “don’t fuck with me, bitch”-look he gave me the moment I tried—and the other, obviously a case of the “who’s T-Built?”-variety, cut to the point on his own:

“You a whore or not?”

He hadn’t said it in malice or to be cruel. I could look back on it and perhaps tell the story of how he was oh-so-cruel and demeaning and go on-and-on wailing “Oh! Whoa is me and the plight of the common prostitute,” but it would have all been a lie—just another pitch along the same lines of “I don’t do anal.” A lie was a lie, and when you were caught in a lie you had to own up to it. Period.

Still…

“You a whore or not?”

He’d said it with six twenties and three tens fanned out in front of him and an expectant look on his face. It was fifty bucks more than T-Built usually had us charge to let Johns fuck us in the ass, but, since he obviously didn’t know T-Built and it wasn’t like I was carrying a menu with our rates on it, I certainly wasn’t about to tell him that.

After all:

“You a whore or not?”

To which I, obviously, thought, Of course I’m a whore, so I’ll feel no qualms in the morning for taking a little something extra for the trouble. What I said, however, was, “Oh wow, sugar! For that kinda scratch I’ll be whatever you want me to be!”

And, surprise-surprise, what he wanted me to be was an anal whore.

At least my butt couldn’t taste latex.

The truth is, long as I’m being honest, that I don’t mind anal sex. In fact, under the right circumstances, I’d go so far as to admit that I downright enjoy it. That said, there’s a big difference between having a private moment in a hot, steamy shower with a well-lubed, battery-powered “friend” and a particularly kinky fantasy—perhaps about a well-endowed admirer who simply must take me from behind so that the cruel baron who’s recently put a sizable bag of silver for my “sweet petals” wouldn’t be the wiser of my activities before meeting him—and trying to awkwardly adjust in some chump’s back seat so that he can awkwardly thrust away inside of mine. I’ve often told myself that if I could ever find a guy who knows how to properly go about working the “other hole” that I’d marry him in an instant. However, knowing my luck, I’d wind up finding myself betrothed to some horrid troll of a man whose only true boast in this world is reading enough femmy magazines in the waiting room of his dermatologist to have actually mastered such an obscure skill.

Needless to say, my ass was sore and my pride was pretty heavily bruised. On top of that, I was feeling strangely guilty about the virgin-kid’s whole ordeal—it was bad enough to have to lose his V-card to a whore, worse yet that he had to go through with it with his old man ogling his every move and telling him everything he was doing wrong. Not that the dad knew a damned thing; everything that, according to him, “wasn’t right” felt pretty right to me. I didn’t feel the least bit ashamed to admit to the kid in private that, if it weren’t for his pops making it a royally bizarre experience, he would’ve actually made me finish. He’d stammered at this, flabbergasted at my words and turning an absolutely adorable shade of red, and, making sure that his father couldn’t see, I slipped half the money he’d paid me back into the kid’s pocket.

“Here,” I’d said as I set the two twenties in the depths of his jeans and punctuated the act with a casual brush against his still semi-hard penis through the material. “Use this to show a girl you like a good time. I promise she won’t be disappointed if you get to seal the deal.”

The kid shuddered, likely cumming a second time in his pants, and I gave him a polite (albeit sensual) smile to see him off.

Despite this, I didn’t let myself think I’d done any great service. I had, after all, scored an additional fifty off the “You a whore or not?”-John, which still put me ten bucks ahead of the game. Besides, with all the money I made going to T-Built and an absolutely laughable fraction coming back to me, he was losing more than I was through my little act of “generosity.” And since it was fifty bucks that would be otherwise unaccounted for after all the night’s “activities” were tallied up, it wasn’t like he could accuse me of losing money that wasn’t meant to exist. As it was, I wasn’t even going to try to hide the extra ten dollars from him. He had ways of making sure that every dollar we took off the street found its way back into his hands, where it would cycle through the total funds raised by the Carrion Crew. Eventually, if T-Built and his higher-ups were feeling particularly generous, there might—MIGHT!—be an envelope with a sloppy ‘M’ thrown across its surface in green Sharpie with something to the tune of thirty bucks that I got to call mine for the week.

Seven hours: nine blowjobs at thirty bucks a pop and five rounds of intercourse, including a pair of hundred-dollar “wrong hole”-specials (plus an extra fifty from my “You a whore or not?”-charmer). At eighty bucks for the other sex sessions and my little act of charity for the virgin-kid, the seven hours tallied up to a whopping seven-hundred-and-twenty bucks. And that had been a slow night for me! Candy and I were practically giving away sexual favors at T-Built’s rates, and I was still pulling in AT LEAST a hundred dollars an hour each night. Even then, my numbers were a joke compared to Candy’s. Despite this—despite an average week from me alone putting roughly five-grand in T-Built and the Carrion Crew’s pocket—I was lucky to maybe—MAYBE!—see fifty dollars of that come back my way.

“If I’d have known what sort of money I could be making as a hooker,” I’d joked (but not really been joking) with Candy after my first month in T-Built’s “employ,” “I’d have dropped out of college—saved myself the trouble of all those student loans—and been my own boss years ago!”

(The cruel irony behind that fact, I’d since realized, was that I would have been able to pay off the debt that had gotten me into this mess in the first place if I’d done just that.)

I cursed my brother’s name again, losing count of how many times I’d thought ill of him throughout the night, and followed Candy down the road towards the bus stop. I couldn’t be sure just how much of my night’s earnings were actually being applied towards the damage he’d caused—the damage I was now expected to cover for—but I found it easier to function and, in the long run, go on with each new day by telling myself that it was most of it.

Nevermind the fact that T-Built had pointed out that he was also deducting the cost of the apartment, the utilities we used, and the twenty dollars’ worth of groceries that he had delivered to our place each week. Nevermind the fact that I was taking the word of a sociopathic felon, drug peddler, murderer, and all-around creep. Nevermind the fact that, at any point in time, either he or the people he worked for at the Carrion Crew were free to decide that some twisted sort of interest was being added to the debt I was expected to pay off. And nevermind the fact that I couldn’t even be sure where I currently stood in that debt with how much I’d (supposedly) already paid off. It wasn’t like T-Built and the gang he worked for were handing out receipts to their whores.

Lucky, lucky me.

I cursed my brother’s name again and settled in beside Candy on the bus stop bench, trying to ignore the glances from early morning commuters that ranged from sheer disgust to under-caffeinated intrigue. It occurred to me then that the sight of a well-used prostitute casually sitting in a natural setting—not lurking in the seedy depths of a dank alley or parading about a street corner—must have been an incredibly alien sight for somebody who was just trying to get from point-A to point-B at such an ungodly hour. Feeling for the awkwardness they small crowd must be feeling, I offered a sympathetic smile in their general direction. The responses, like the initial looks, varied from outright horror to blind rage and fizzling out with a few kinder souls to sympathy. I convinced myself it was sympathy, at least; I couldn’t bear the thought of being pitied.

All of it, both the grand picture and all the little pieces that it was comprised of, boiled down to that one repeating chunk of insight that refused to leave me alone:

“You a whore or not?”

As I waited there, feeling sore both inside and out, among the peeking, whispering mass of opinionated early birds, I suddenly began to weep. Whether I was or was not a whore, I realized, was irrelevant; this was my life—built around me bar-by-rusted-bar like a cell that caged me in despite the crime committed not being my own—and I’d never been offered any choice to decide.

I was a prisoner in a jail cell on the corner of Lyle and Church…

And I didn’t even have to drop the soap to take it up the ass. All you had to do was ask.

“I tell you what, girl,” Candy said, nearly singing, as we took our seats on the bus, “first thing I’m gonna do when we get home is take one of those Icy-Pops in the freezer and sit my aching keister on it! Right down on it!”

She shot me a lusty grin, something that hinted towards how sore her own rear was while also hinting towards a more lecherous, “bet’chu it’d feel better than they did”-implication. It was just the sort of joke she’d tell. There was no shred of pity or sympathy in that grin, nothing that even remotely hinted back towards the kind, nurturing soul she’d become only moments earlier when I’d begun to first weep and then outright sob there on the bus stop bench. In that instant, she’d been like a mother: her arms around me, her hands pushing my face to her chest, and her words kind and full of understanding. The crowd, despite only moments earlier gawking at the two of us, were quick to look away, finding everything and anything else suddenly far more fascinating. Apparently it was socially acceptable to sneer at a pair of prostitutes at a bus stop unless one of them was in obvious distress.

“INSTANT INVISIBLE WHORE: JUST ADD TEARS!”

But Candy had been there to make it right in her own way, telling me that I’d be alright and that nothing was forever. And, somehow, those words—“Nothing is forever”—were all it took to plow through all the pain and fear that the other words had put there.

I could almost bring myself to forget those words in Candy’s arms.

Then the bus had arrived, spurring a flurry of mandatory activity that did not include self-pity or tears, and by the time we were on and heading for our seats there was little of the emotions that had birthed the initial weeping left to bring a second litter into being.

And, just like that, I was seated next to an entirely different person.

No, there was no hint of that Candy in the grin she gave in response to her joke about icing down her anus with a popsicle. She’d swooped in, given me exactly what I’d needed in that instant, and then, in the very next instant, was giving me what I needed once again: a distraction.

I forced my own grin back. “Long as it’s not one of the lime-flavored ones,” I injected with forced humor. “Those are my favorite.”

“Did it ever occur to you that the reason the lime-flavored ones are your favorite is because they’re the ones I use to take the burn out of my bum?” she challenged, her wicked grin widening in a challenge for me to do the same.

I met the challenge, my cheeks aching as I did. “Impossible,” I said, looking down and trying not to laugh. “Your bum’s strawberry flavored. The whole neighborhood knows that.”

Despite my efforts and Candy’s typically concrete façade when it came to humor, we both brayed in shrieking cackles that only began to die down when the bus driver scolded us for making a ruckus.

The strange smells were coming out from the mystery door when we got back to the apartment. Candy and I could hear signs of life from one of the other apartments, another pair of T-Built’s hookers fresh off the streets and, from the sounds of it, debating about what flavor of ramen they’d be indulging on for dinner. The other doors were quiet. I didn’t mind the silence. Granted, I didn’t mind the signs of life, either. There was a certain degree of peace that came from either of those two things, I supposed. But the quiet that emanated from behind that door, paired up with the strange smells, made me incredibly nervous.

Again I found myself wishing I could place the odor. In any number of books I’d read, something like this always served as an early indicator of something horrid and terrible, a dead body or, better (worse) yet, a whole bunch of dead bodies. These moments always made for great literature, exciting and all, and I held no shame in thinking those stories were made better for it. But this was no story, no book, and the idea of sleeping and eating so close to the resting site of at least one corpse was an entirely different sort of revelation. Because, just like in the books, if a body (or bodies) rested at the opposite end of a mysterious door, it was because somebody put it there. And, more often than not, the sort of person that hid corpses behind mysterious doors was the same sort of person who turned living, breathing people into those corpses in the first place. There was a very crucial act that separated a person from being a “somebody” to being “some body;” an act that, though Candy and I dealt in the business of pleasure—which should have been as far from the business of death as business could get—we were constantly and uncomfortably close to. And, since it was T-Built who not only ran our operation but also provided us with these lodgings—and since we were all well aware that T-Built was not only capable of killing but seemed to outright revel in the chance to—it wasn’t a huge leap to imagine that the mysterious smell coming from the other side of the mysterious door could be—

I forced myself to stop in mid-thought, shaking my head violently of the grotesque visions rotting in the depths of my mind.

Because I knew what death smelled like. It wasn’t a knowledge I was particularly proud to have—“Hi! I’m Mia! I’m an Aries, I’m a natural blonde—you can check for twenty bucks—and I know what decomposition smells like!”—but, like so many other trivial facts that manage to worm their way into our noggins, it’s something I know. I also wasn’t particularly proud of the “how” that held hands with the “why” in regards to that knowledge, either. But that was a thought for another moment, and I was too fixated on that door.

That god damn door…

No, it wasn’t death that I was smelling. Moreover, it wouldn’t make sense if it was. Death clung and cloyed; it grew and spread. Death, as an odor, was a stain that assaulted the nostrils instead of the eyes. And, like a stain, it was either dealt with or it got worse. It didn’t come and go; didn’t arrive for an unexpected visit like an annoying relative. But this smell—this stink—did just that. It came and it went, always just the same—no stronger or weaker, no variation or accompanying smell. If it was death we were smelling on occasions like these, if that apartment was being used as a momentary placeholder for the corpse between being where it was and where it was meant to go—a “rest stop,” I thought and nearly threw myself into a fit of hysterical laughter while Candy wrestled to find her keys to our own door—then it stood to reason the smell would change at least a little each time. One corpse had every right to smell a little different than another, didn’t it? Betty, who wore Chanel #5 in life, shouldn’t be condemned to stink the same as Bobby and his beloved Axe body spray, right?

But this…

There was no death, and there was no variation. Not on the other side of that door, at least.

As these thoughts boiled away in my skull, the smell of artificial shrimp flavoring started a cautious waft from the door where the other prostitutes had obviously come to some agreement on their supper. It was a salty smell, undeniably food-born—or at least in the realm of food-like—in its origin, but there was something synthetic to it, as well. And this, I shuddered with realization, wasn’t unlike the other smell. I knew with absolute certainty that whatever the other smell was it was not food—not even remotely in the realm of it, either—but, in the world of smells, it was being carried on the same serving tray of “man-made” in its origin.

And yet…

Pictures of hospital beds, cat boxes, dirty refrigerators, and janitors’ closets sprang to mind all at once. All random places and things that, at some time or another, had assaulted me with their own bizarre-yet-identifiable stinks. And yet it was none of these. And, worse yet, there was a strange heat behind it. This, however, I more sensed than smelled. I couldn’t even be sure how one could smell a temperature without slipping into the void of saying that something was burning. Granted, “burning” seemed a close enough concept. If anything, this seemed to be a sort of precursor to “burning,” but still hovered in a strange and lonely place that earned it only remarks of concerned confusion instead of panicked exclamations.

“Forget it,” Candy said as she yanked her keys from the bottom of her purse as though she’d been wrestling them from the grips of something hiding down there. She hadn’t even had to look back to know what I was thinking.

Torn from my thoughts, I found myself curious how long I’d even been thinking it. It felt like a lot more time had passed since we’d ascended the steps and closed the distance to our door than I imagined possibly could have. Something about the night—about me almost literally working my ass off, having a full-scale breakdown at the bus stop, and then walking into a cloud of that mysterious smell—seemed to be doing something to my head. Everything felt airy. For a moment, I was certain that I was dreaming; that I might have drifted off and was still on the bus or maybe even the bench. I was about to check my eyes, thinking I might gauge how much time had actually passed based on how dry they were since my crying fit, but then Candy grabbed my shoulder and pulled me inside.

“This won’t come as any surprise to you, Mia,” she said to me as she closed the door, her voice hushed despite us being alone in our home, “but we are not living the good life here. We are not working a cushy job and nobody’s about to confuse this place as the Ritz anytime soon. This is, pardon my bluntness, a bad life. We are living a bad life. And while we can do what we can to keep our spirits up despite that it is foolish to think that there won’t be bad things—bad ongoings—taking place around us at all times. You see something bad, hear something bad, or, yes, even smell something bad, and you’d do well to pretend you didn’t see, hear, or smell a goddam thing, got it? You got it? ‘Cause, bad as this life is—bad as things are—they can get a whole lot badder if you go peeking, listening, or even sniffing around where you got no place peeking, listening, or sniffing. This is our home,” she announced matter-of-factly, stomping her fuck-me boot heel on the floor beneath her. “This!” she repeated, “This apartment and nothing else! Outside that door,” she pointed over my shoulder towards the outside hall, “we are not home, and anything that happens out there is somebody else’s business—T-Built’s business—and the way that we stay alive is to keep our eyes, ears, and noses out of other peoples’ business, especially T-Built’s. You got me?”

I stared, bewildered by the suddenly stern and serious tone that was coming out of the normally playful and carefree Candy.

Then she slapped me. Hard.

“I said ‘you got me?’, Mia!” she hissed.

“Y-yes. Yes, Candy, I got you. I…” but I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I just nodded. My face stung; felt hot. I forced myself not to touch my cheek, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from watering. Feeling as though the stink that occupied the mystery apartment and crawled about the outside hall had ears, I stifled the second wave of sobs that struck me at that moment.

“Oh, girl…” Candy’s voice broke and she threw her arms around me. “I’m so sorry.”

I wanted to tell myself she was apologizing for hitting me, but I was regrettably too smart to believe that.

I’d been here before.

I wasn’t sure how or where—I thought I would remember being trapped in a hell like this!—but it was too familiar to not be the first time. Not that it being familiar made it any better. In fact, it made it much, much worse.

I was trapped. It was dark, uncomfortably warm, and there was a smell. The smell, like me, was trapped. It hung somewhere between sweet and sour; reminding me all at once of thawing meat, fresh mulch under a hot sun, and something earthy, ancient. A deep part of my brain chanted that it was the oldest smell in existence, and another part, deeper still, assured me that I’d one day come to contribute to it.

I knew that smell. I knew it the same way I knew I was on the first step of a twelve-step staircase that led down into deeper darkness; the same way I knew that the surface my hands pounded against was a door that should lead to freedom. And I knew that that door—that freedom—was closed and that it would never be opened; that freedom had been stolen from me. And my brother, Mack—though he was only Malcolm in that moment—was the thief.

I knew all of these things with such a startling certainty that I also knew I must have been here before. But, for the life of me, I didn’t know how that was possible.

Trapped. I was trapped in a dark, horrible, smelly place.

“This won’t come as any surprise to you, Mia,” a voice seemed to call from a distant place, not in the here-and-now, but somehow prevalent all the same, “but we are not living the good life here.”

Whimpering, knowing what awaited me down in those warm, smelly depths but also knowing it was all my life amounted to, I turned away from the door and started down the steps.

One…

Two…

Three…

“We are not working a cushy job and nobody’s about to confuse this place as the Ritz anytime soon,” the voice continued, talking me down the steps like an instructor working me through the motions of some horrible cycle.

Four…

Five…

Six…

“This is, pardon my bluntness, a bad life.”

Only halfway down the stairs to my new world and the voice had gone and summed it all up perfectly. A horrible, nearly precognitive fear took hold of me and I had to take hold of the rough, splintery railing to keep from toppling down the rest of the steps.

Seven…

Eight…

“And while we can do what we can to keep our spirits up despite that it is foolish to think that there won’t be bad things—bad ongoings—taking place around us at all times.”

My hand traveled along the railing. As the eighth step became the ninth, it went from rough and splintery to smooth and tacky. It was unnerving, and while my eyes had come to adjust enough for me to investigate the spot where my hand lay I knew not to. Keeping my gaze trained on the darkness ahead, I removed my hand from the surface. I knew it would be better to fall the rest of the way into that black abyss than to let my hand spend one more second on that railing a moment longer.

I thought of my father’s paint cans. I thought of old Band-Aids. And then I thought I might turn around and try for the door again; thought that maybe Malcolm had let go and I might escape from this (life) place he’d trapped me inside.

Then something at the bottom of the stairs, something waiting in the darkness, said, “You a whore or not?”

And suddenly, just like I knew everything else, I knew there was no turning back. There was no escape from this (life) place.

I cursed Malcolm’s name—curiously calling him “Mack”—and continued down the stairs.

Nine…

“You see something bad—”

Ten…

“—hear something bad—”

Eleven…

The hot, reeking stench seemed to reach out like a living thing and grab me as my foot fell on the second-to-last step.

“—or, yes, even smell something bad, and you’d do well to pretend you didn’t see, hear, or smell a goddam thing, got it?”

Getting it, I took another step—Twelve—and finally dared to take another step into the darkness, away from the stairs.

“‘Cause, bad as this life is—bad as things are—they can get a whole lot badder if you go peeking, listening, or even sniffing around where you got no place peeking, listening, or sniffing.”

Here it was dark. Here I had to look with my hands. My mouth was filled with the taste of latex. My vagina and my anus hurt. I was crying. And, all the while, I searched on with my hands, looking for something or somebody that might help me get out of this (life) place.

“You got me?” the voice called out, seeming to offer itself to me.

And then my hands fell upon the soft, stinking mass of a long forgotten corpse. Gasping at the fresh wave of rot that assaulted my nostrils, I blinked at a sudden wave of clarity—light!—that illuminated my freshly discovered treasure.

And there, before me, I saw myself. I stared back, naked and dead and rotting—my legs splayed and my body showing signs of recent use—and I held my arms open as a lover might when awaiting an embrace.

“You got me,” Dead-Mia moaned up at me, triumphant and elated.

“You a whore or not?” the other voice called out from an unseen corner.

Then, seeming ecstatic to answer the question, Dead-Mia leapt at me, grinning wide and exposing a length of latex still occupying the corner of her mouth. “I said ‘you got me?’, Mia!” she bellowed, taking hold of me and pulling me into her.

As a fresh batch of darkness enveloped me, a strange, alien thought came to me:

Death didn’t smell so synthetic the first time…

I woke up screaming. My throat already hurt, and I guessed in an instant that I’d been screaming for quite some time. My suspicion was confirmed when I realized I wasn’t alone; when I realized Candy was already in my room, in my bed, and holding me to her as she had already back at the bus stop. She spoke to me, but I couldn’t hear her words over my own screams. Beyond my shrieks and the pleasant hum of Candy’s words, I was distantly aware that one of our neighbors—another of T-Built’s prostitutes—was banging on the wall and demanding silence.

I wanted so badly to give it to her…

But the screams just kept on coming.

Behind the curtain of terror that fueled them, though, was an ongoing and crystal-clear thought:

God damn you, Mack. God… fucking… damn you!