Enkindled

 

       The trouble with imagination was that it helped one survive the lies but made the truth difficult to determine.

 Jackie had a wild imagination.  The mistress would tease her but admitted it was what made her good at what she did.  It was an easy business, pretending, so long as you imagined things just right.  Jackie imagined that the politicians who came to her relied on her skills and confidence to guide them to better policy. She imagined the other girls were her sisters and the mistress was their mother and that they were a family.  She collected magazines and lined them at her windowsill and imagined life elsewhere.  Italy, New York, a dusty road in the home of a banker in west Virginia...

        There were worse things than being plagued with a vivid imagination.  She could feel sorry for herself, and they way her life was. She could have cried for the way her skin had become numb. But, it was by her own doing.  She was to blame.  So, she didn’t allow herself to cry, ever!  Imagining was the only way through it.  Besides, they were just bodies. That's what Jackie told herself, closing her eyes and fading away.  Drifting off into places that weren’t real, in a time that wasn’t now doing things that weren’t this.

She didn't always feel numb. There were boys that made her smile, men that liked to play and watch what pleasure looked like on her.  Regulars brought her gifts and requested her.  But there had been enough of the other kind of men who took out their frustrations on her or drunkards that liked strange things she couldn't say no to.

When He walked in, she didn't know it yet but He would change everything. It didn't happen right away. It was slow and awkward at times and she would have refused to call it anything straight off. But after a while, because of Him, she could never go back to the way it was before.

 She often heard the mistress talk about working girls who fell in love and the men that broke their battered hearts.  “There’s nothing more pathetic than a whore in love!” 

 Jackie knew it!  But there was something too enticing to allow her to turn away, because with Him, she could feel again.  Not just in her body but everywhere...as if finally, she was whole and things were real. 

 She imagined there was a wick inside her that had suddenly been lit.  It was if she had come to light and all at once life was warm and lovely. She must allow herself the luxury of its glow, even if only for a little while.  So, in the quiet of her mind, when no one else was watching, she silently burned and warmed herself by her own thoughts.

Remembering all the things she had done; the abuses she had seen, the lies people told, and the money she took for what she did.  How could the mistress allow all of the lies and offences and scoff at…whatever it was that Jackie was feeling for Him?  How could it be that rape and greed and debauchery were permissive but this, this hopeful pleasure she felt was sacrilege?

Sometimes afterwards, He would fall asleep and she would lay beside him, just feeling grateful and there was no where else she wanted to imagine herself.

 There was a place above His lip, beside his nose at the tip of his cheek that showed only when He smiled.  She would kiss that spot when it was time for Him to wake, savoring the look of it one last time when their hour was through.

He would rise and dress and she pretended not to care.  She knew enough to know that men didn’t like trouble and complications and she wanted him to come back.  So, she smiled and swallowed tears and hoped he felt the same.  Sometimes it seemed he did, when he helped her or played with her hair or when he took control and moved inside her slowly,  until she shook and the strangest kind of tears came over her. But she knew her imagination was lying to her, and she hated it.   

She hoped for the strength to endure the sadness she would feel when he quit coming back, when life would go back to the way it had been before.  She shuddered because she knew that no amount of imagining could save her from the ache of that.