Happy Birthday to Me

Subject: Happy Birthday to Me Fri Mar 19, 2010 1:52 am

Flashback

I was turning ten today and here I sat just as the sky began to darken into night. My mother had lost me again. I was in another foster home. This one was a dump. But could I say anything to the caseworker. Oh no. These people were the best in the world. That's what they said about the last one. And she had been a drunk like my mother. I still had the marks from the belt she had used on me. At least my mother had never hit me. These guys were low life losers as well. She kept saying how much of a piece of white trash I was. And he was strange. He insisted I take a bath or shower with the door open. He looked at me and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

So I had gotten out tonight, snuck away for a little while. They had forgotten my birthday and it was a sucky evening. I kicked a can as I walked down the street, a little white girl at home in the slums. My brown hair pulled back in pigtails, and my brown eyes big and beautiful. I wore a simple school uniform that was a little wore. Could my life get any worse. I had witnessed my friend, Hollywood get killed near here, and my mother was whore. And according to the new family, a white trash hooker that would do anything for a fix. I wanted to punch them. It wasn't fair. Where was my prince charming, where was my princess cake. Why could I not be a normal little 10 year old. I walked the street not really watching where I was going. Anywhere would be better than here was my only thought.

-299-

Subject: Re: Happy Birthday to Me Fri Mar 19, 2010 2:30 am

     The darkness and filth of the city seemed an entity in itself, a malicious lord that slid across the sky like a lazy cat... oil and neglect coursing across its asphalt arteries. Across that hard, black ground, another shadowy figure ran, not much larger than a kitten. Her soft paws were attuned to the clouds more so than this artificial, blighted rock below her, but she ran anyways, ran even as she could feel the nastiness of the city seeping in through her raw and bleeding feet.
     Her eyes were large and yellow, wild and open to a roundness only achievable to creatures in the throes of the purest of terrors, that is, the fear of the unknown, of the destruction of the integrity of the body and spirit. She didn't look over her back, she knew what was there, could feel its heavy, fetid breaths on her hind quarters and she ran all the faster until she thought her heart would burst.
     She fled beneath the kicking feet of one girl, her steps so quiet and swift she may have been the shadow of a passing bird. As negligible as the fox's mass was, the beast that came barreling after her, jaws agape and snapping, would be a bit harder to ignore: a huge, skeletal hellwolf with glowing red eyes.
     The girl may as well have been a trash can, however, for all the attention the beast gave her. The fox, not familiar with the structure of the city, turned immediately into a closed alley after passing the girl and found herself cornered. Unfortunately, the swift gesture didn't lose the monster behind her and she could hear him moving to block her way back out. Panicking, she tried to jump over the pitiless brick, but it proved too tall and when she clawed at it she slid down, down with a cruel inevitability.
     So she turned, snarling, her little back arched and every hair erect and quivering as she turned her fangs towards this thing of terror that now came at her slowly, steadily. "SSsss... we want to help you..." it wheezed. "We must do thissss... to ascend.... we will be... assssss one.... we will be sssssstrong... little... vickssssssen... little angel..."
     "Get away from me!" she snarled, scooting into the unyielding stone.