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I can still hear her crying as he dragged her into the bedroom. The horrible rhythmic squeaking was overpowered by her voice, gasping and wailing. She pleaded for him to stop. I can remember when he was finished. The way he walked out into the kitchen. I sat in the corner near the tree, playing cats in the cradle. A single string of Christmas lights reflected off the unfinished hard wood floor. My mother always told me not to attract his attention when he was like that but I stared at him as he walked to the icebox. He saw me in the shadows as he closed the door of the fridge. He looked at me with glazed, resentful eyes and spoke. I can hear his words as if he were speaking them to me right now.

"What the fuck are you looking at Veronica? You're just like your fucking mother. And you know what, you're going to end up just like her!"

The image fades in my mind and the Christmas lights are replaced with neon from the streets below. Returning to the task at hand, I grab my pack of Parliaments and the chrome decanter of whiskey from the small table and light another cigarette. I adjust my stockings sizing up my long legs and gaze at my reflection in the mirror. Swigging from the bottle, I glance back at the mark and remind myself exactly why I took this job.
They've moved onto the bed now. She sits naked straddling him. Her hands find balance on his bulging belly while his hands find other equally ample resting places. Her body is still taut and robotic. She looks like a pro. I'm certain she's been doing this for years. It takes time to forget how to feel. It's no easy feat, making men want to own you. It takes time to learn the cost of using your body to manipulate them. Taking control, and stripping them of their power and then handing it all back to them for a few lines of blow. I wonder if I was ever that weak. I put out my cigarette with my heel of my shoe and think about my mother.
I remember the day my father left. It was three weeks after my eleventh birthday. It was late Fall and we were living in an apartment not much better accommodated than one I'm in right now. He stumbled in at four in the morning, inebriated and fuming from some money he had lost at cards. I found out later that he had also been fired that same day from the cab company for drinking on the job. My mother knew better than to try talk to him when he was drunk but the heat had been turned off that morning due to unpaid bills. It was a cold autumn and the apartment felt like a morgue freezer. She greeted him warmly, almost genuinely. She smiled and hugged him like a loving wife should. He could barely stand. He groped her thighs, hips and legs, barely able to speak, the whiskey working hard. His breaths came out in warm heaving clouds and with in moments he led her to the bedroom.
"Veronica!! Get me a beer for Christ's sake!" he yelled.
It was a consoling command. I stood and walked into the kitchen and prayed that everything would be all right. And it was, until she mentioned the money. In a split second her head snapped sideways and I saw the rage in his eyes.