Venita

The cab pulls up in front of my home and I get out and fish around inside my purse. The pathetic jingle of a coin or three tinkling together greets me. I pay the cabbie and then he is on his way. With a sigh, I shut my wallet and stuff it into the back pocket of my worn jeans.

Home, I think, staring up at the apartment complex sprawled in front of me.

The word apartment complex is way too luxurious for the place I call home. The building is on the poorer side of Los Angeles. Just like everywhere else, there is the elite, expensive side where the socialites stay, the orderly side where the average men stay and then there is this side. This is the side that everyone wishes was coloured out of the maps.

I continue forward, my shoes slapping against the floor, loud in the silence of the night. My heels are in my hand as they are every other night. After spending the entire day on my feet in heels, I would rather walk barefoot home than spend one more second in those damn traps.

I push our huge main door in. There should be a doorman here, or at least a guard. Our landlord does not have the extra penny to waste on security for people like us though. This building is inhabited by people that others should guard against.

Unlike the outside of the building, the inside is quite noisy. The thin walls offer the residents no privacy. I hear a couple arguing, a baby crying, someone's phone ringing. The tiny lobby is also unmanned, and in fact many people use it to keep the few broken and useless things they don't want anymore. It will all be emptied, eventually. I walk faster, in a hurry to get out of the halls and into the relative safety of my apartment which is on the third floor.

"Shoot." I say, glancing at the huge wall clock hoisted just before the stairs. It is a miracle the thing still works. I am quite sure the batteries have not been changed in more than a year. I am later than usual today, but I did take up two shifts and still stayed an hour extra. It is past midnight.

The stairs creak under my feet like the groaning of ghosts, my weight causing each one to sag suspiciously. They will collapse one day, and I had better not be the one on the stairs when that happens.

On the second floor, a door opens and someone hurries forward, one of my neighbours, Maria. Her head is down and her hair is covering most of her face but I still glimpse the spot of colour on her face around her eye when she brushes past me. I make no comments, I simply continue to the next flight of stairs. In a neighbourhood like ours, it is much better to pretend like your neighbours don't exist. Nobody stops anyone to make conversation, we simply brush by each other, our suspicion trained on the other person, alert in case they try to do anything funny.

I encounter no one else as I hurry towards my door, jamming my keys into the keyhole and turning. The pile of papers in front of my door is unmistakable, my daily mail. The mail is the only system that still works efficiently in this building; the bills will not pay themselves. I drop into a crouch and gather the handful before I push into my apartment and shut the door behind me, hitting the switch and turning the lock simultaneously. Turning around, I behold my home.

It is tiny. I have no sitting room, there is just my bedroom which has its adjoining bathroom and kitchen. What else could a girl ask for? It is small, so small that I cannot take eight steps along the wall but it is clean and it is home. I sling my wallet and the papers onto my perfectly laid bed and go into the bathroom to freshen up. The makeup goes first, a light coating on my face more to protect myself from the rest of the world than the other way round. Waiting tables has certain expectations, cloth-wise and look-wise.

You can be the type to auction your body as much as your tray; these people have their boobs practically hanging out and skirts so tight and so short you could drop a pen and get an eyeful on your way back up. They get loads of tips at the end of the day so everyone's happy. If not that, you can choose to auction a certain part of your body, in my case my legs which have received a compliment or two in the past. I don't complain about my tips, sometimes they are the ones that pay my bills and not the actual pay. If not those two, you could decide to wear full length trousers and long-sleeved tops in the heat of the town but in a place like this, where the only person hungrier than you is the person next to you, that is almost not an option at all. The makeup is a mutual agreement between us all. Most of the other ladies wear it to look more attractive. I wear it because I cannot stand to live such a miserable life in my element. It is my war paint of a sort, a flimsy shield between myself and the world but I will take that rather than go fresh-faced and vulnerable in my irrational opinion.

After cleaning off the makeup, I have a quick shower. The hot water has long since stopped working and even though the night is a little chilly, I have bathed enough times to be used to it.

After, I stare at myself in the mirror. I look worn out and tired. There are dark circles beneath my eyes and my eyes are dim, like a shutter has been pulled over them.

"Why is my life so shit?" I ask my reflection.

If this was a fairytale, there would be a shimmer and my reflection would begin speaking to me. She would tell me that great treasure awaits me and I'm destined to be fucking rich. I huff and turn away. Fairytales don't exist.