Pride

“We are rarely proud when we are alone.”

― Voltaire

Kali stood on the roof of Coach’s looking down at the town like she was some fucking queen looking down at her realm, but she knew she was far from that.  Her elbows rested on the big letters that announced that yes, they had liquor there, even if the neon lights had long ago gone out and would probably never shine again.  Were it not for the moonlight and the candle she’d placed on the floor, shielded from the wind by sign, she’d be in total darkness.  She felt relatively safe up there, away from the Creepers since they hadn’t figured out how to climb ladders, and she was alone, with nothing to keep her company but her weed, alcohol, her worn out notebook and a bunch of stupid thoughts.

Sometime last week she’d made a decision to stop writing.  It didn’t matter.  No one would read her shit.  Some Indiana Jones type wasn’t gonna find it in the rubble of Arklay a few hundred years from now and publish it, like she was some modern day Anne Frank.  She had nothing to be proud of, no great story that would inspire anyone into making a movie.  Plus, there would be no Indiana Jones, there would just be Creepers, dragging their fucking feet, or their guts if they didn’t have feet, up and down the streets in search of someone to eat.  How fucked up would that be?  To not be able to die, and just drag your ass around town looking like shit.  You wouldn’t find anything to eat because everyone would be as putrid and fucked up as you are–forever.   So she’d taken another toke off her pipe and another swig from the bottle and tossed the notebook aside.

Yet here she was tonight, with a candle, her little pencil-box stash of weed, a pencil she had sharpened with her knife, and the fucking notebook.

Alone.

Every fucking time someone walks out of Coach’s I think I ain’t never gonna see them again.

I think Kei is gone for good.  She’s too proud to just fuckin’ let shit go and just say “Nathan was being an asshole, but he was drunk and what the fuck ever.”  And she didn’t even stick around to see if Nathan would forget his pride and just say to Kei “sorry I was an asshole when I was drunk.”  And I’m too proud to accept that I need them around me, to beg them not to fucking leave, so I let them walk off without saying a fucking word.  Kei said some pretty fuckin’ nasty things to me too, but you don’t see me fuckin’ moping in a corner waiting for shit.  She fucking called me a doormat.  Maybe I am.  Maybe I haven’t shaken this shit Buck put me in.  No, shit I let him put me in.  I got that collar off, but maybe it’s really still there.  I can sometimes still feel it.

I don’t know where Main goes off to.   Sky has his guy, Boots does her thing and so does Ranmir.

And WTF do I have now?  Some fuckin’ run down nasty ass bar in a town where half the people are dead.  True, before all this shit I walked around all proud.  I was Buck’s girl.  I had bling, and anything I wanted (except the dog I wanted to carry around in my purse).  I wasn’t like the other girls, who took on any customer that came around.  Nupe.  No one touched me unless Buck said.  No one disrespected me, except Buck, I realize that now.  And I was proud of that!  Queen of the Fucking Hookers at the Golden Club.  

WTF do I got to be proud of now?  That I’m still alive?  I ain’t never even fuckin’ killed one of those things.  Someone always does it for me.  My hair looks like shit, Buck sold my jewelry on our way here, and half the time my jeans are dirty because it’s such a pain in the fucking ass to wash them.  If it wasn’t because I’d had all my hair lasered off last year, holy shit, then I’d really feel like shit, or shittier than I do now.  I can’t even imagine walking around with dirty clothes and huge bushes under my armpits.  

Kali sighed and took another look around, shaking her head as noticed the shuffling slow gait of a Creeper a few streets down and she wished she’d had one of those big guns soldiers carried in movies.  Just sit up here all day, looking through the cross hairs and pick them off.  But who was she fuckin’ kidding?

Now I feel responsible for others, for the bar, for the people in it.  I worry if they eat, if they drink, if they get enough sleep.  I worry when they leave, and keep on worrying until they come back.  I worry that we have enough shit in the bar to keep us busy and working so we don’t stop to think about just how fucked up everything is and how fuckin’ pointless.  Like someone died somewhere and made me queen of this hell hole.  And I need to walk around all proud and in charge of shit, when most days I want to forget it all and sink to my knees at someone’s feet and just breathe.  Someone stronger than me, someone who knows just what the fuck they are doing.

She wasn’t stupid.  When she did go to school she had good grades.  Some things, like handling money, came easy to her. She could look at a stack of bills and give a pretty close estimate to how much money was in it.  But she wished she had paid more attention and stopped painting her toenails while Buck handled guns and the uglier side of things.  Even shit like when another girl looked at her cross-eyed, all she had to do was whine a little to Buck and pout and the bitch was gone.

Maybe it was time to change.  To find something she could truly be proud of even when she was sitting in the dark and alone–because she knew, first-hand, that was the only time when pride really mattered.