Whispers of a Former Life: Episode 46

Charity felt the entire world tilt when Alejandra’s fingers clamped around the backpack’s frayed strap. One moment she was hidden in the stale, scratchy darkness of the hoodie sleeve, the next, her stomach lurched violently as gravity swung her sideways. 

Inside the bag, her Little body registered everything with unbearable clarity. She could feel the flex of the canvas walls as Alejandra slung the bag over her shoulder, every creak of the stitching popped in her sharpened ears like tiny ropes groaning under tension. Her heart skittered at the raw detail. 

Outside, every step Alejandra took didn’t just send faint vibrations,  they rolled through Charity’s bones in crisp pulses. Her recalibrated hearing caught the faint grind of grit under Alejandra’s sneakers, the whisper of denim rubbing as the giant girl’s thighs brushed together. Once, she would have tuned it all out as irrelevant background. Now, her Little nerves took it all in: a low thunder of human life, crashing endlessly overhead. 

When Alejandra paused to pull open her front door, cold city air sliced through the bag’s thin plaid weave. Charity’s skin prickled immediately, too thin to hold warmth the way it once had. Her new Little physiology was tuned to pull oxygen more efficiently through skin and breath alike,  a survival edge for her tiny lungs. But that same trait made the cold bite deeper and faster. 

She burrowed further into the folds of Alejandra’s hoodie for heat, hating how instinctive the motion felt. Hating more how the faint, familiar scent, a mixture of cheap floral perfume, skin oils, and the earthy residue of Alejandra’s weed,  wrapped around her sharper sense of smell like a blanket she couldn’t refuse. 

When they reached the first bus stop, Charity didn’t need to see the doors hiss open to know they’d arrived. Her heightened hearing picked up the purr of idling hydraulics, the subtle rattle of plastic windows a moment before the bus even braked. The thump as Alejandra set the bag on her lap felt like being dropped onto a live drumhead. 

The zipper hissed open for a second. Light speared through, blinding her hyper-sensitive eyes that now caught more detail, more motion, even in shadows. Reflexively, her pupils pinched down to a pinprick,  a trick her new biology granted to protect delicate retinas made for low light. She squinted, saw a blurred slice of pavement, then flinched back into darkness as the zipper closed again. 

People spoke all around her,  two women giggling in Spanish, the mutter of the bus driver cursing under his breath,  and Charity’s mind ached to process it all. Her Little ears seemed to grab every syllable at once. Even inside her makeshift hoodie cave, she couldn’t not hear: the hiss of a soda can tab popping six rows back, the faint squeal of an old woman’s shopping trolley wheels, the thick clunk as someone’s boot hit the bus step. 

It should have made her feel powerful, this new acuity, these upgrades to her fragile human frame. Instead, it made her feel even smaller. More animal. It meant she could listen to every word the giants spoke but could never raise her own voice loud enough to join them. 

When the bus jerked forward, the motion forced a little squeal from her throat,  a tiny sound, immediately swallowed by the drone of the city beyond the plaid walls. She curled tighter in the hoodie sleeve, telling herself it was for warmth, not fear. 

She could smell the stale metal of the bus’s air vents bleeding through the bag. She could even smell faint traces of food on Alejandra’s skin, tortilla flour, a ghost of old frying oil. She hated herself for noticing. 

Another stop. Another shuffle. Another round of casual conversation from Alejandra with some cashier or bus driver, too far for Charity to see but painfully close in her sharpened hearing. She caught phrases she didn’t know,  mande, sí, señora, ándale. They sounded rough and fast and real. Charity’s new ears soaked them up, but her uneducated tongue couldn’t follow. 

So she just pressed deeper into the hoodie’s sleeve, letting her skin draw faint warmth from the coarse cotton. Her breath came faster, feeding the high-efficiency alveoli that worked harder than any normal girl’s lungs could. A marvel of survival,  and yet here she was, surviving for what? To be tucked next to an old ChapStick and a half-smoked joint in a bag that wasn’t even new? 

When Alejandra finally shouldered the bag for the last time that morning, Charity was half-dozing from sensory overload. Her Little body recovered from fatigue faster than it once did,  a trait built into her new cell structure,  but it didn’t stop the constant background ache of humiliation from coiling under her ribs. 

The bag lifted, swung, settled tight against Alejandra’s warm back. Charity could feel her guardian’s heartbeat, a steady living drum too big and too close. The same heartbeat that owned her now,  legally, biologically, in every system that mattered. 

She closed her eyes against the rhythm. She hated it. Hated how her sharper ears clung to it anyway, like it was the only steady thing in a world she couldn’t command anymore. 

This was life now. 
The Little girl with the eyes that could see in the dark, the lungs that pulled air through her very skin, reduced to luggage on the back of a girl she used to call the help. 

Somewhere outside the fabric walls, the city roared. Inside, Charity held her breath, listening to every echo like she might learn how to be human again from the noise alone. 

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