Excerpt: These Chartered Souls

I remember something pressing down upon my lungs, and all of a sudden waking up, coughing violently, every breath inhaled burning the very interiors of my body. I saw smoke--an abundance of threatening, gray smoke--and felt the heat rising with my body temperature, and all I could think of was that I was going to die. I was going to die right then and there, and nobody would care. I would be reduced to ashes and not even given the courtesy of having my death reported. I knew what happened to prostitutes and sex workers, especially child sex workers, when they died; since we were invisible to the government, we never existed in the first place.

I was thinking about all this in my mind as my feet remained planted into the increasingly warm wooden floorboards. I couldn’t move a muscle. Though my head was screaming at my body to move, I felt like I was frozen to the ground. I could hear the chilling sound of high pitched, bloodcurdling cries coming from the next room, the room where the seven- and eight-year-old girls slept in, and my stomach turned. I doubled over, crumpled to my knees, and uncontrollably gagged and gasped as the screams next door grew faint and eventually disappeared altogether. My heart was pounding double time, and all I could think about was that I wasn't going to make it.

That was when I felt a small hand grasped my upper arm in a determined grip and firmly tugged me off the floor and to my feet. I turned my head and caught a glimpse of a distorted halo of wild hair. It was Isobel. But at the same time, it wasn’t the Isobel I thought I knew. Her normally serene eyes were imbued with an intense fire, an intensity to survive and to escape from this alive. Our eyes only met for a split second--mine huge and scared, while hers burned with adrenaline and the desire to survive--but that was all we needed to establish a connection with each other. From then on, we shared something that nobody else could put their finger on, something that bound us together for the rest of our lives.

How we got out of there, I do not remember. The next few seconds, few minutes, flew by in a blurry haze of smoke, stumbles, and desperation to make it out of there without being crushed by the crumbling infrastructure. I do remember the ominous sound of the front door collapsing behind us as we straggled out just in time, coughing and spluttering and not yet registering the fact that we had done it. We had managed to crawl out of there alive, without any serious injuries.

There were no paramedics, no fire trucks blaring its horn and flashing its red and orange lights. There was just a large crowd that had formed, a crowd that consisted mostly of the girls from our brothel returning back from work, and the other girls and madams from other houses. All of the madams, including Madam C. herself, looked on with horror, but most of the girls sported twisted smiles of satisfaction on their faces. It was disturbing to watch the sadistic glee distorting their painted faces, and so as Isobel and I joined the crowd in watching the fire consume the place I’ve refused to acknowledge as my home, I fixed my eyes on the brilliant, flaming rooftop, mesmerized by the glistening red tiles that glowed vermillion with the rising sun.

That night, we lost thirteen of the girls, ages seven through ten. In three days time, half of the girls had been replaced. By next week, our losses had been fully compensated and exceeded: a new batch of fifteen girls and a bigger house on an adjacent street with the same red trimmings of hell.