Author Games Compilation [Cycle 2]

One-Shot, One Kill - Prompt Four

Prompt: Historical Fiction; write to the song "Mulher do fim do mundo" by Elza Soares.

It is the twenty-eighth of June, nineteen sixty-nine. Summer heat runs rampant through all of the tired, ready bones down Christopher Street, and the yellowed lights stringing themselves from the sign Elaine stares at now, with a dimpled smile, bronzes her already brown and bare arms. She links her fingers together excitedly, and glances behind her, in wait of the others. In all honesty, she craves to go in through those doors right now, just to get her drink on ahead of time - God knows she needs it - but she promised she'd wait. She reminds herself that she needs to know that all her girls made it through the week. She reminds herself that sometimes, sometimes, someone won't meet them that week, or the week after, or ever again. This turns her excited finger-fiddlings into something spurred by anxiety, and her breath hitches, and-

Deep inhale. Slow exhale. She reminds herself that sometimes her girls just take a little longer getting ready than usual. It's no easy feat covering up the blackened eyes, or the busted lips, or a cheek split open by angry knuckles. There's no real reason for the injuries - no real reason at all, as far as she can tell from her own experiences - but horny white men often do a lot of things without reason.

Then again, she does break the law every day just by being. Being here, too, might land her in jail til tomorrow morning, where she'll finally learn whether she gets to go free - with her name in the paper - or pay the twenty dollar fine just for dressing and acting and talking and being a particular way. It's happened a few times, now. A logical person would cease coming back to this place again and again, night after night, if imprisonment and fines and humiliation were all the aftermath they'd be left with.

But her consistent return makes perfect logical sense to her. This place is all she has. It's a place of solidarity, and warmth, and compassion. Who cares that the precinct's police raid it on an almost formal basis? Who cares that there's no funding because of who it serves, that the toilets overflow and there's no running water? That if it were to catch fire, there would be no way out, because there's no fire escape? That at least once a month, New York sends its paddy wagons up to the door, and throws men who dress as women and women who dress as men in the back? Who cares? Because really, what does she have to lose?

Elaine has already been subject to disgrace and disownment; fuck, why else does she live with seven other girls, and not the ingrained image of a mother and a father and a brother and a sister all praying to their Lord and Savior just before a fresh dinner of chicken and beans or whatever else her parents must be cooking up right this moment for the family she's no longer a part of? Why else must she sell herself instead of working a stable, safer job, and risk the nightly beatings? Why else would she keep coming back to Christopher Street to wait for her girls and stare up at that sign longingly, knowing full well of the consequences?

She has been cast out. Left with nothing. Nothing but these small scraps, and anger. Oh, it makes her angry, oh so angry, and it rises as she waits, left alone with her thoughts. Thoughts are dangerous that way. They said in school, back when she wasn't twenty-six and lonely, that some thoughts were more dangerous than others, and that those who harbored them would no longer be children of God, and would be a danger to society.

But when Elaine looks at herself in the mirror, she doesn't see herself as any danger. She sees it all as unfair - but life is unfair, and she has to live with what she's been given.

The Stonewall Inn makes it easier to live with that.

"Damn, girl, you're gonna chip off the paint on those nails if you keep on digging 'em into your hand like that!"

Elaine's shoulders relax, and she loosens the hands she's been clenching into fists without realizing. A delicate palm glides over her back, reassuring and familiar, and then Elaine is trying to regain her smile again, just for her girls. "Maybe if you didn't take so damn long, Annie," Elaine says, shaking out the extravagant black curls framing her face, "I wouldn't have to go through all the worryin' about you lot." She tenses again, and glances around the street. "Josie with you? And Jed?"