Fiction Friday: Faultless, Part 2

Continuing on from where we left off... wow, was it really a month ago? Bit of a short one, but this feels like a natural break point.

Content Warning: Child abuse/neglect

It wasn't her first time outdoors, of course. She'd been in the garden many times, to pull oranges and avocados off the trees or smell the flowers or just feel the sun on her skin. It was hot out there, beyond the faint blue glow of the cooling spells at every door and window, and sometimes she just needed to be hot. She would stand out there and hug herself tightly and just let the sun wash over, beating at, imagine it squeezing its way through her skin and deep down inside. Sometimes for hours, if nobody came out--she had a vague notion that she was not supposed to go outside, but fortunately there were a great many doors between garden and house, and she could always get back inside without being seen.

But this wasn't like going out into the garden. You couldn't see anything but house from there--you could hear the noises of the city, and sometimes smell its smells, but not see it. Ghost found that these days she very much wanted to. Maybe it was from being in the cellar so long, but she had developed a powerful yearning to actually see the place in which she was, supposedly, growing up.

Of course, she'd watched people coming in and out of the house for years. She knew that you dressed differently for outside than in. She wasn't entirely clear on why, but she could see what--going out meant shoes, and frills, and hats. Fortunately there was the ragpile in the corner of the laundry, where all the clothes that couldn't be mended or cleaned went. Ghost had gotten her smock there, and the one before it. Before that she was fairly sure she'd been dressed by the servants, but it was long enough ago and she'd been small enough that it was only a vague, fuzzy notion. A lot of the past seemed to dissolve into those, sometimes very quickly.

From the ragpile she procured her secret treasure, her going-outfit as she thought of it, a broad-brimmed hat that had once been white, with a chunk missing from the brim, a pair of shoes that were only a little too big for her, and which she stuffed with torn and crumpled paper stolen from her father's study, and a light, loose white dress with a broken strap, but she was able to tie the two halves together. The result was a little lopsided and too big for her, falling well past her knees, plus it was supposed to be belted at the waist and she couldn't find a belt, but it would do well enough.

She slipped out the servants' and traders' entrance when no one was looking, and found herself on a sort of ribbon made of a strange rock, gray and pitted with other rocks--all smooth and rounded and in a variety of colors--sort of half-buried in it. Up the hill and to the left the ribbon split off a side-branch which ran under the house's main gate--Ghost thrilled to finally see it from the other side--while the main trunk of it continued up the hill. Some ways beyond that, at least ten times as far as Ghost had ever walked in a straight line, was another house.

To the right, the ribbon--which, Ghost realized, could only be a road--descended to the base of of the hill, where it grew suddenly wider. From up here she could see buildings of all descriptions lining it, and dirt ribbons--roads, she corrected herself, or maybe alleys?--running away from it through more buildings, spreading out as far as she could see. And rising up from it came a blurred hubbub of noises, voices, sounds Ghost couldn't identify, sharp cracks and creaks and a sort of rumbling undercurrent to it all where the sounds just gave up and dissolved together, and smells! Good smells, bad smells, cooking meat and baking bread and garbage and something not unlike what Ghost's cellar had smelled like by the time she was let out of it. It was enticing and horrifying, inviting and lurking--but within all those things it was exciting, and Ghost was determined to experience it at least once.

She set off down the hill.