Pokow didn’t understand what it was about Tuesday nights that brought so many girls in her makeshift office. Every single Tuesday without fail she was up, cleaning up people’s fluids, stitching people up, brewing up anti-pregs and mixing scaraways. Why was that? She had hoped this day would be a little different, a new girl had moved in. Usually the new girls get the brunt of it all, but nope. Here she was, swamped, just like any other Tuesday.
What was Dianne even getting paid for this? You’d think she’d value her property, since they were her only means of living, but nope. She let the girls go untreated, and Pokow, out of the kindness of her shriveled, bitter heart, would risk her life fixing them up. You’d think they’d be a little more thankful and do something nice for her every once in a while.
“This one’s got a bruise,” yells Romee in a lackadaisical tone, grabbing a girl by the arm and swinging her towards the doorway without a second glance. The curtain somewhat blocked her view of the stocky woman, but fabric and a wooden cage was not enough to block out her sultry voice.
The girl doesn’t enter the room, electing to instead stare from the outside with blank eyes, eyes that reminded Pokow of the dead. She had more than a bruise. The entire left side of her mouth was swollen and blotches of crimson stained her clothes and were smudged across her swollen cheeks from a heavily bleeding nose, mixing with unflattering beige makeup.
“Did you ice her yet?” asks Pokow out of habit, but she already knew the answer and she was already preparing a cold rag and and ice bag by the time Romee answered:
“Nah, you know how I feel about the color red.”
Pokow rolls her dark brown eyes, but giggles on the inside.
“That joke gets less and less funny every time you tell it, and it wasn’t funny to begin with,” she says, behind a poorly contained smirk.
The girl in the doorway and Kina make eye contact, wincing at each other, and Pokow becomes suddenly embarrassed.
Her shame turns to venom and she motions to the girl in the walkway and says, “Dead girl!”
The girl snaps to as if she had been sleep while standing. Her entire countenance changes, becoming more tall, more relaxed.
“Come here! How am I going to help you from over there?”
She obeys wordlessly.
Pokow wipes her face, exposing chalk white skin with turquoise blotches, places the ice bag in her left hand and puts it to her swollen mouth. This wasn’t the first strange skin condition she’d seen. Ever since The Haze, all kind of strange, even ludicrous, deformities were showing up on children. This girl had better be thankful that she was born with a fully functional body. But... this explained why this was just like any other Tuesday.
Pokow pulls out one of the paper dolls she uses for young children out of a thick stack and hands her a pen. They were just plain cutouts in the shape of human bodies, nothing fancy, but they served their purpose quite well.
“Go sit over there by Kina and circle on the doll wherever you’re hurt. When you’re done, set it over there on my desk and sit back down.”
“Which one is Kina?” asks Dead Girl facing six other females, two children, four adults.
What a dumb question. There was only one seat left in her bedroom, where else could she sit?
“The little brown girl with the afro puffs.”
It was hours before she got around to the new girl. By then, Kina had twisted her thick coily mass of hair into long, uneven ropes. Where her scalp showed, black stains were exposed, most likely from a terrible dye job. Whoever had styled her up for her stay really did not give a fuck.
Dead Girl had only circled the face where the mouth would be, the blank nose, and a couple other places where she had obvious injuries. Nothing severe. Her nose had stopped bleeding on it’s own but she gave her a serum to spray the scab that had probably formed for the itching that was to come.
She scanned her once for good measure, as she always did with children and pregnant women, and found evidence of repeated stress in her knees and knuckles and scar tissue in places that didn’t make sense.
“So, before Dianne bought you, were you a test subject or a maid?”