Carmen

A Story by Cher

A detached story of a girl who has nothing left to lose.

Every value hotel has come to look the same to her, through her never-seeing eyes. Always inconspicuous, never rising above neighbouring structures, car parks in the basement with flickering lights. The lots are seldom filled, and every car has its own personal space of two lots on either side of it -- nobody would risk meeting a colleague or acquaintance in this secret underground.

The lifts are brightly lit with sterile fluorescent lights; four lifts in a lobby, two lobbies on every floor, each at either end of a long corridor. Exiting the lift on the fifth storey, she turns left. The floors are cool and hard, marble tiles echoing her footsteps and reflecting her image.

Her kohl-lined eyes and thick mascara obscure the fleeting emotions in her washed-out brown irises; with lipstick on, her lips are painted the colour of rotten cherries, and a layer of bronzing powder masks her fair complexion. In her lace-up stilettoes and mid-thigh dress, she looks nearly predatory though she is the prey. Her façade is the only protection she has -- she intrigues and enchants, but what they do not understand makes them wary. Though they try and fail to make sense of her, they never will hurt a girl so reminiscent of an exotic animal. All they want to do is to hunt and have her, an enigma shrouded in mystery.

She reaches beneath the door for the card left there for her and, in one smooth motion, swipes it and swings open the light rectangle of varnished wood that passes for a door. The room is sparsely furnished and crammed and there are no chairs, no table, no mirror, no lamps, but the room has all that is needed. A washroom stands to the right of the entrance, a bed straight ahead. Mounted on the wall at the foot of the bed is a widescreen television -- a horror movie is playing, but there is no sound to be heard. Above it, an air-conditioning unit fills the room with frigid air. Her breath condenses in front of her, a cloud of white dragons. The stench of liquor hangs heavy in the air, but beneath that are the mingled scents of perspiration and old smoke that have seeped into the curtains and carpet, a medley of base notes that make up a bad perfume.

As she hears the water stop flowing, she undoes the complicated hooks and laces on her dress and stilettos. Carmen, only seventeen, detests being touched more than is necessary. She detests her life too, but she gets through by making detached observations and never seeing; only looking. She has no choice because she no longer owns her body. She did, once before, but she desperately needs this money to survive.