Whispers of a Former Life: Episode 71

The paper curled again. 

Charity groaned, not aloud, but in that low, breathless way that lived in her chest now, where frustration couldn’t even afford the dignity of volume. Her tiny hands pressed down on the paper with all the strength her arms could muster. The edge refused to cooperate. It buckled like fabric, limp in the center but stiff at the crease, as if mocking her attempt at neatness. 

She hadn’t expected this to be so much. Not so exhausting. Not so sticky. Not so humbling. 

The coffee table beneath her knees was scratched and splintered. Each knot in the wood was a small hill. Her bare feet, clammy from sweat and resin, slipped occasionally when she shifted her weight. Her knees burned from constant contact with the grain. 

The joint she was building, her fourth attempt at a complete one, looked like something a toddler might roll out of Play-Doh. Crooked. Lumpy. Straining its seams. The weed didn’t distribute evenly. The resin clung to her skin, matted to her forearms, filled the creases between her fingers. 

It had been hours now. Or maybe less. Time didn’t move the same way when you were five and a half inches tall and trapped in a landscape of clutter and obligation. A table could be a field. A stray flake of cannabis could be a log. And a simple, stupid task, one Alejandra had done with a flick of her fingers, became a full body ordeal. 

The water bowl loomed at the table’s edge. From her perspective, it looked like a small birdbath, ceramic, shallow, cool at the bottom where condensation had started to form a ring. Beside it sat a balled-up piece of toilet paper Alejandra had left for her. A “towel,” she’d called it. 

Charity dipped her hands into the water. Her fingers ached from repetition. She pinched the edge of the rolling paper and slowly dragged it across her lips. 

The taste was stale. 

Not the sweetness she imagined adhesive might carry, but something bitter and powdery, like licking the back of a sticker. She fought the urge to gag. Her tongue was dry, and the damp line she left was uneven. 

Still, she pressed the paper closed, and with painstaking care, smoothed it down along the sticky seam with both thumbs. The joint didn’t seal perfectly, nothing she rolled ever did, but it stayed together. 

That was enough. 
 
“Patrona, the water dish is for you you wet the rolling paper not your hands.” Charity said with a smile.  

She crawled to the end of the table, where the finished joints sat like pale logs stacked haphazardly into a pile. Some were longer than others. None were quite straight. But she arranged them in fives, as ordered, pushing them with both arms into loose rows. 

“Qué lenta eres,” Alejandra muttered somewhere overhead. 

Charity didn’t look up. She didn’t speak. Her lips were stained green from the resin. Her knees hurt. Her arms were beginning to cramp. 

She rolled up another piece of paper. The weed clung to her like fur. Tiny flakes were caught in the strands of her hair. Others had gathered along the hem of her fraying tank top. She could smell it on herself now, that musky, earthy pungency Alejandra always carried. 

I smell like her, she thought, and felt her stomach knot. 

This wasn’t just about working. 

It was about dissolving. 

Her scent. Her shape. Her voice. Her choices. 

Gone. 

The next joint she attempted collapsed at the middle, the paper folding in on itself. She pressed it flat and started again. Her body moved slower now, each motion dulled by fatigue. Her hands trembled more. Her back ached from hunching over for so long. Her tongue scraped dully across dry lips. 

She paused. 

“Alejandra,” she whispered, voice hoarse and uneven. “Can I… can I have some water?” 

She didn’t expect much. Maybe a bottlecap. A drop. 

Alejandra, lounging on the couch, didn’t answer at first. Then, with a soft grunt, she pushed herself to her feet and sauntered toward the kitchen. The refrigerator door groaned open. Bottles clinked. 

Charity perked up. She imagined the cool kiss of water. A splash in a tiny dish. Maybe even a straw. 

But what landed beside her with a thud was not water. 

It was a Corona. 

Alejandra didn’t even look down. She just plopped the bottle on the table beside Charity and returned to her seat. She cracked open another for herself. 

Charity stared. 

The glass towered over her, golden and sweat-slicked, droplets of condensation already sliding down its sides. The cap was still on. The label half torn. But the bottle perspired heavily, pooling beads of cold water at its base. 

She stepped forward, tentative. 

Kneeling beside it, she pressed both hands against the glass. It was frigid to the touch. Cold enough to make her fingers ache. She turned her head and, like a dog, licked. 

Her tongue brushed over one of the cold droplets. It was water, yes, but tinged with something metallic and faintly bitter. Still, she licked again. Then again. 

She drank from the sweat of a beer bottle. 

That’s what her life had become. 

As she crouched there, lapping at moisture that wasn’t meant for her, her mind slipped backward to a memory. A hot afternoon in a Mexican market. She’d been tucked in Alejandra’s bag, baking in the fabric, her face pressed against a zipper. She remembered the street vendor, the sizzle of sausage on a flat-top grill, the crowd of strangers all towering above her like moving skyscrapers. She remembered begging,quietly, for water. 

Alejandra had set her down beside a clear plastic cup half-full of melted ice. 

And she had lapped at that too. 

Back then it had seemed like an isolated moment. A bizarre, degrading blip in her otherwise surreal journey. 

But now? 

Now it was a pattern. 

A rhythm. 

She wasn’t just small. 

She was dependent. 

She wiped her mouth on the towel scrap, turned back to her work, and resumed. 

Roll. Wet. Seal. Stack. 

Her arms ached. Her shirt clung to her with sweat and resin. Her hair curled damply at the edges. She smelled like Alejandra. Like the couch. Like the room. Like this life. 

No, she thought. Not like the room. 

Like I belong to it. 

Related Images: