Member-only story
Not All Children Are Born Blameless
The young woman showed up on my porch before dawn with nowhere to go
Her black eye was a few days old, and neither of us caught the other’s name. She knocked on my door at 4 a.m. She was tired. She asked for socks.
An hour later she returned. Two officers stood on the street, their shadows carrying long down the cracked pavement of my block. “They told me I had to go somewhere,” she said. She came back to my house. I do not know why.
She was small and had a round face. I thought she might be a child. The police officer assured me that she was an adult. He laughed a fatigued laugh to let me know there were parts of this story I didn’t know.
She smelled of alcohol; poor people alcohol that comes in plastic bottles, cheap strawberry-flavored wine that has a handle. She had clearly just gotten kicked out of wherever she had been, it was nearly dawn for Christ’s sake, and her lip was starting to swell.
The officer said, “Yeah, we definitely know her.” Same laugh, not hateful, just stale.
“Is there no place for her to go?” I asked.
She stood on my porch, holding her coat tight though it was not cold. She was watching us as we talked. Her eyes were dark like history, dissonant against bright…
