I feel tenacious ecstasy. I walked a thousand steps down a hundred alleyways to find myself here. Alone and unafraid. My dingy secondhand coat hides the sparkle of the sequin flapper dress I found in a church thrift store basement. It’s vintage and smells of forbidden days when you could speak easily and consume Patty’s White Lightning in hidden cafes. Now the liquor flows like a river but speech is hidden away behind locked cupboards and mason jars. Everything has been sheet rocked and bottled. Stamped with a whiff of quirk pulled from a list of safe insanities. It’s not hoarding if it’s humboldts. I stare hard at the Cross of Eire scratched into the metal firedoor. The light is dim. There is no art to this etching. It’s raw, scratched in using broken fingernails and dead dreams. I knock three times and the door opens. I step inside to find a bordello of emotion. Passion and sadness are sold beside joy and anger. I smile.
The prompts for this short story:
bordello
tenacious
i feel
the cross of Eire
ecstasy
Copyright 2019 Klaudia Grady