~1.1~

Woe entered her apartment through the window, as usual. The ladders on the aging iron fire escape were badly rusted and terribly unsafe, but she was able to lower herself down off the roof onto her private balcony without difficulty.

Her dwelling consisted of a single room on the top floor of a factory that had first been legally converted to loft apartments, and then been illegally partitioned into the sort of squalid squat that she might have been able to afford, if she ever paid rent.

She had no furniture, except a two-drawer filing cabinet on which sat a microwave. On top of that was a small coffee pot and a hot plate. The peeling walls were decorated in a fairly madcap fashion, with everything from newspaper clippings to cheap animatronic fish to swords and axes made from the finest steel in all of Pakistan to lithographs, mostly of ladies in flowered hats. There was a hooked rug on the floor, and a sleeping bag, several books, magazines, bits of chalk, candles, and all kinds of odds and ends. There was a toilet and a sink in one corner of the room. It was to the toilet she went first.

Lifting up the lid of the toilet bowl, she scattered some flakes inside for Herman, her fourteen-year-old gold fish, as she did twice a week. She held up a hand and opened and closed it in a child-like sort of wave, and made some fish faces at him before gently lowering the lid and consigning him once more to the darkness. She then went to the sink to check her appearance in the cracked and dirty mirror which hung over it. She smiled and gave her head a little shake to make her pigtails bounce, to make sure she still looked every bit as cute as she felt.

She did.

Her hair was starting to lose its green, though.

She’d have to do something about that, if she could scrounge the money.