[color=gray][h3][sup][sup]
Sunny always said that sex wasn’t about the destination—it was about the journey. It felt good, yes—often it felt more than good, even when it wasn’t something you wanted or liked for yourself. No, what was really special about the journey was that you got to be seen while you got the customers off. They themselves might not know it, but they loved you, just for a moment. 

Sunny spoke lovingly about this phenomenon often. It was something to smile for. It was real. It was enough. And the first time Fi had sat in with her, just learning the ropes, Sunny smiled at her. She always did. If she wasn’t smiling at the customer, if her face wasn’t smothered in some pillow, she always tried to give Fi a smile, no matter how strung-out, how lost that smile might have been. 

As long as someone saw you, things were going to be okay. You see? You were real. You were enough. You were loved. 

And Sunny believed in Fi from the very start.

And Fi was seen. She was seen every day. Even more so as she’d gotten older. She tried to embrace it. She saw Sunny’s smile. She took Sunny’s pills. And when Sunny left, she wiped away the tears and tried to keep on smiling, just like they’d promised each other. Little Fi did her best to make everyone happy. 

But it never clicked like it seemed to for Sunny. Fi would gag and sputter. She’d sober up and see the stains on the ceiling and yelp if something hit wrong.

When Sunny came back, Fi had hoped for guidance. But what she saw shook her, shook her like the last lingering memories of what came before this place did. She remembered Sunny wailing and begging, pleading with Missus Orta to keep her. And when she did get to stay, and she pulled that smile back on and hugged Fi tight, as she pulled back, there was something different. Her lips curled the same way. Her lashes still fluttered. But that sparkle in her eyes felt somehow alien. Like glass instead of a shallow pool. Frozen and unnatural.

Sunny got right back on the horse. And Fi tried to follow. Happiness, she felt, was just outside her reach. Sunny had found it, somehow, and she was clinging to it even though Fi never saw her pop whole pills or throw back drinks like she used to. So Fi kept looking to the customers, trying to uncover what magic Sunny must have found in them. As she got older, it stopped hurting. Sometimes, it even felt nice. Physically-speaking. But it wasn’t something physical she was supposed to be looking for, was she?

So what was missing?

Sunny avoided speaking about her experiences outside the house’s walls whenever possible. Fi, she said, was so fortunate not to have all that nastiness weighing her down. Her life here was something special, after all. Much better and more precious than anything else. Thinking about all that nonsense just weighed most people down. But Fi was light and free; she had more potential to fly high than anyone else in the whole wide world—though she shouldn’t go around saying that. And Sally, for her part, begrudgingly admitted that there were worse parts, but also better ones. At least the old men here sometimes brought gifts, and usually didn’t beat her. Was it perspective that Fi missed? Was it truly so much better here?

She reopened the issue with Sunny carefully at first. She wasn’t asking about the world—that nasty, cold, mean old world—she was simply asking about the future. About what happened to most of them when they grew up. And so one day, Sunny brought curious young Fi and Sally to see Madame Pearl. 

Her girls had it good, see. Pearl said so herself. They had as much food and booze as they could ask for. They got good pay, good picks of Johns, and safety. It was just another family, just like with Sunny. Just a family for adults was all. 

But Fi wasn’t satisfied with that answer. She began to pick at Sunny herself. Why had Sunny come back, if there were places like this? Places that were just the same as here. Why did she cry and beg to return? Sunny said nothing at first. She evaded and shied away from the question. She didn’t see why Fi would want to know about that sort of awfulness, really. But Fi kept picking. Finally, she got through. She pierced the veil and got an answer. Not the answer she was looking for, but an answer all the same.

Sunny delivered it quickly and sharply, like a sudden smack to the face. 

[i]“Fine!”[/i] she’d snapped, [i]“You wanna know, do you? I went to Nam. And it’s the same there. Except worse. So much worse.”[/i]

How? Fi wanted to know how. How was Viet Nam the same as here? Sunny had tried to click back into shape. She tried to brush Fi off again. But Fi had found a chink in the armor and dug in deep. And she watched as that shining smile crumbled into a shower of tears.

[i]“It’s the same, okay? I was supposed to be a soldier. I tried. I really tried. But nobody loved me as a soldier. Nobody even believed I really was one. I was someone’s faggy little brother. Then I became a toy. A toy they didn’t even love. Just the toy they settled for when they were in the jungle. I was nothing.”[/i]

Sunny tried to compose herself then. She tried to pull it together and be the adult in the room. And what she said to Fi echoed the same as those words before them, just perhaps not in the way she’d hoped. 

The devil was beating his wife on Sunny’s face, and all she had to say about it was, [i]“But sweetie? God made us this way, sweetie. We don’t get to choose what we are. But we get to choose to love ourselves for it. We get to choose to be pretty and special and earn that love. And we get to choose to love ourselves for it. Love yourself. Let yourself be loved. Don’t fight it. That’s why I’m here. I want to help you to love you. Stay with the love, sweetie. Never leave the love. As long as you have love, you’ll be something. And I know—I know people will always love you.”[/i]

Fi took that, and sat with it. She tried to navigate it with Sally. All Sally could offer was, with the solace of certainty, there was no need to think so hard about it all. Whoring was as certain as death, but it could be a hell of a lot more fun if you let it. So Sally ate and smoked and drank and fucked and climbed atop a mountain of nihilistic hedonism. 

Fi tried to follow her up those slopes. She tried. She tried praying. She tried looking out the window at the big wide world. And every now and again, she’d speak—really speak—to the guys who visited her—in particular, the men who talked about their mothers when they treated women a certain way. She saw fragments of lives and identities. And as she sprouted from child to adolescent, those thoughts became deeper. She heard about dreams and regrets, about choices people did and didn’t make. 

Nobody here ever made choices. Not really. Fi wasn’t sure if Sunny or Pearl had even ever made a real choice in their lives. And these people who visited her, especially the poor ones, had often been forced along the path of life more so than they’d chosen it. It was hard to change trails. Nobody who meant what they said believed change was easy. And if you wanted to, you had to be true to yourself. 

So who was Fi? She was a warm body and a nickname, someone who could bring a smile and an orgasm to most people, but what was she other than that?

She couldn’t remember her real name. She couldn’t remember her parents’ faces or much about them, except for how her mother skipped with excitement when they moved into that new house in that up-and-coming neighborhood with the good school that she’d told Fi so much about. She had more family than that. There was an old man, same color as her mother, who would sing to her. She couldn’t remember a single line of a single song, but every now and again, she’d hear a deep, rich voice on the radio singing a beautiful, mournful tune that stirred the place those memories should have been.

Sally knew who she was before this. Sunny knew who she was before this. Other kids still clung to who they’d been beyond this. Some merged the old and the present, as Sally had. Some seemed to let that past inform what they’d become, as Sunny did. A few kept that old human self and doggedly, uncompromisingly enforced it upon their new lives. Like Genny or Cherry or whatever she had declared. She was sleeping in the bed right then, passed out with a textbook resting against her chest. She could read. She could write. She dreamt of different skies and different worlds. She demanded it.

It had frustrated Fi at first. Didn’t this child know that all of that from her old life was gone? Didn’t she understand that there was one way out and forward? But she did. Cherry had pulled that bitter smile and kicked and screamed not against whoredom itself, but against allowing it to swallow her whole. She continued to be a person. 

And then when Fi looked elsewhere, seeing Sally embrace an inescapable existence, hearing Sunny praise this inescapable existence, she finally understood.

There were people underneath the makeup and the lingerie and the bodies. There were things motivating them. They had things they wanted from life. Cherry wanted that which she believed she was entitled to. Sally wanted whatever she could get her hands on. Sunny wanted love and joy. And they would all force the world to be that way for them.

Fi had tried other people’s wants. She had been other people’s desires. She had tried to bend herself in every way to become something that fit. And yet even that which she was genuinely talented at, she found fleeting satisfaction from, if any.

Sitting there on that bed, in the sullied remains of her Sunday best after a busy night, Fi let her face settle back in her hands.

Her wants were fleeting. She had never even touched them. She didn’t even want what she needed anymore. She hadn’t felt hungry in years. When she was sober, all she felt was her insides slowly rolling over in her grave of a torso. She could hear her heartbeat if she stood still. There was no discernible emotion between the sensation of these pulsing organs and her conscious experience.

All she had was what she lacked. There was so little she cared for. She drifted along, a ghost given flesh, people-pleasing and yet feeling none of that joy reflect in her own eyes, as Sunny had encouraged. 

She had no past. Her future and present were the same. She had no part in any of it. Sally was named for a cartoon pig. Sunny and Genny were named for their attitudes. Fi was named for the only feeling she could routinely muster: her nausea.

She knelt down before that porcelain altar and where others would pray for relief, she embraced what was to come. She could think about any number of things and summon it. Tonight, she thought of how she’d been forced to eat a hearty meal. In the past, when she’d been forced to eat, it had been Sunny grimly holding her nose shut and forcing food into her mouth. Today, she’d eaten under the foolish dream that the soulless beast who’d torn into Cherry would take her sacrifice instead. 

It was its own relief. As she sweated and shook, as lightning jolted through her veins and thunder and torrent roared from her insides, Fi felt. She truly felt. She was swallowed by the sensation. It was here and with a man’s hand clenched around her throat that it was natural and right to sink into the darkness. Into emptiness and nothing. 

And Fi loved it.

But she came up for air. She had to. Someone would always make her. Sunny would push breath back into her. Sally would keep her hobbling along with drugs. The kids would keep her stumbling forward with a bastardized purpose.

She didn’t have the strength to keep her death.

So who was Fi? She was selfless. She always did things for others. She had no self. She was nothing. Nothing to worry about. Nothing inside. Fi was a human body. A kindly human body kept alive by unnatural, unholy means.

She prayed not to God, but to someone else. Anyone else. Whoever could sever that thread for her. But just as God ignored her, so would the men of the Earth. Like father, like son.[/sup][/sup][/h3][/color]