Her Orphan Loneliness

The high school girl who loved me was named Evelyn, but everyone called her Eva. We sometimes worked the same graveyard shift and we got all the freaks in at night. The screw heads, the tweekers and lonely perverts, the old men with no wives and the children with no parents looking to steal condoms so they could use them as balloons.

At the time Eva was younger than me, somewhere around five or six years my junior. I was her boss, but mostly I was her male figure. Her father had left her mother years ago, so she naturally craved any male attention she could find, especially if they held power-whether it be an Audi A5 coupe, or the laughable responsibilities of a night manager. So she would smile as I craned my neck to get views of her just to brighten my dismal nights.

We had fooled around a few times, exchanging our tongues and lips in the back office during the late night shifts, her young body and eager mouth pressed up against me, my hands up the front of her shirt.

Once I had let her leave work for a few hours to go to a party. When I told her to have a good time, she smiled and stepped our of her tan work khakis and strode to her locker in a pink thong. She put on some small shorts then walked back to me, and kissed my cheek quickly. I licked her face in response.

I walked away towards the back room, off of the awful sales floor where the elderly crawled about, milling around bargain basement prices and cold shelves of deviously advertised products which had no real use or value. I unlocked the door and stepped into the poorly lit backroom, collapsing onto some boxes. Work always exasperated me, making me feel as though I was missing some great event under a wide open sky somewhere, while I squandered my youth for a few bucks an hour inside a dingy and dark back room of a store.

High school health teachers always fed me the propaganda about the pain drugs caused. But they never told me about the pain my soul would experience from working a meaningless job a well trained ape could do with no sweat.

The door unlocked and Eva stepped into the backroom, nervously looking to see if Krause was around, but then smiling at me. I looked up from my position as she pulled up some boxes next to mine. She gingerly sat next to me, smiling, probably because she realized that if I, the boss, was sitting down on the job, hiding in the back room, then it meant that she could do so too. I vaguely thought of telling her to go back onto the floor, but quickly dismissed it. No sense in squandering my youth for a few bucks an hour inside a dingy and dark back room alone.

She sat next to me and smiled again, anticipating. I smiled back, glad that she had decided to join me after all. Her shirt rode up her back, and when she leaned forward I could see down the her back, her pink underwear riding up her ass crack, teasing me.

When she saw me, she talked in sugar covered tones.

"Hey, Mr. M." Her voice dripped with honey, slow and smooth.

"Hey, Eva." I responded, feeling like the teachers that would monitor the bathrooms in high school. We both knew it, knew that we were fools for each other, but we were both very scared of doing much about it. I had my conscious, but I was morally flexible. She usually had some football player or some twenty something meathead chasing her, but most of the time, a short jail term or fist fight with a half back seemed completely worth her bold smile and thin neck that had a silver chain with a horseshoe dangling from it.

She loved horses.

Eva folded her hands down by her waist, arching her back and puffing her young chest out towards me. Unconsciously getting closer, and looking at me, studying me, to see how I reacted. She was used to young boys and old men falling over themselves, trying to communicate with her, or trying to get a better look at her, or trying to get into her.

"Guess what?" She asked me, brushing her blonde hair back behind her as I starred right through her.

"What?"

"I gots a new tattoo!" She exclaimed, pulling the front of her jeans down an inch or two below her hips. She should’ve had hair down there, but it was obvious that she didn't. A spiraled heart wrapped around some type of equestrian creature, redly imprinted into her flesh. I wonder why she loved horses.

But I never asked why, and knew that I never would. Because I didn‘t really care why.
"Beautiful girl." I said, with no commas.

"Let me see your tattoo again, please?" She asked, feigning shyness.

I untucked my soft work short and turned around. I pulled up my clothes for her to see my back.

"That's so badass." She said, being sure to catch my eyes.

"Thank you," I said, half smiling and keeping to the script, "your's isn't half bad, either."

A door opened and crashed shut, and a larger woman walked in. Star, her eyes alert and bright with the burden of a child growing inside of her, the details lost and diluted because at least she had a reason to live for all the world to see in her uterus. Long, dirty blonde hair fell over her brightly hopeful eyes, rimmed with the sadness of the poor, as she could barely afford for herself to eat, let alone another child. I frequently gave her money for vitamins and dinner. She was paid modestly by my boss, and I knew she gave it all to her dipshit ginger boyfriend who was addicted to Oxycotin and Hydrocodone.

She'd be pretty if she wasn't so naive.

"Hey, Mr. Moon Manager, I came up with a great name, tell me what you think?" She told me, referring to her unborn offspring who is either male or female, no one knew.

"You think of new names every day." Eva said, and it was true.

Star is a child having a child, which is becoming more and more common to me each and everyday. My generation is the new baby boomer generation, everyone I knew from high school was either a drug addict or pregnant. Or something in between. Star was younger than me, slightly older than Eva, and readily admitted that her childhood was shit. Thus, she was determined to create her own family, and by extension a child that she could provide for. Somehow this would avenge the emptiness which she had felt when she was young. I’d tell her that she was throwing her life away, especially with the red-headed faggot that was her boyfriend, but she would just smile and start to hum songs I didn‘t know.

"You see, I don't like going out to clubs and bars like you do." She told me once.

"I don't have many friends, so I'm not going to miss going out with them or anything if I have a kid. I just want to stay at home and be a mother."

“I don’t like going anywhere, either.” I muttered.

“You go out all the time.” Said Eva.

“Yes, but that’s only because I can’t sleep.”

“Well, I sleep just fine, thanks.” Star said.

"Yes," I said, "but what if you want to change your mind? You can't raise a child on 7.50 American dollars an hour. Say you want to go to school and get a degree, say one of you gets sick, say Shithead won't watch your child?"

“Moon, you worry too much!” Star sighs.

“No, Moon is just really smart.” Eva defends.

“No, I don’t have anything to offer anyone except myself.”

"Oh, please." Star says to me, barely listening, playing with a strand of thread from her second hand clothes. Caught up in her own delusion, people born blind didn't know that they're blind until someone told them. "Cassio isn't that bad, I think he'll make a great father."

She was referring to Shithead. I always forgot his real name, and confused him with other skinny read heads smoking cigarettes on the street.

I sighed in disgust. Children having children. Ruining two lives at once. Population control. Bad public schools. The tax rate.
I was several years older, but with a deep fear of fatherhood, especially when I was with women without condoms--even when they insisted that they’ were on birth control pills. I saw procreation as the cause of suffering. To live is to suffer. I'd never consciously bring life into the world, despite the joys and splendor I've seen and accomplished, because I'm quit sure there's not enough to go around. In America, children are a sign of poverty.

"Maynard." Star said, finally pulling the string from her worn dress.

"Huh?" I asked. Eva was checking her cell phone. I wondered if she had a boyfriend.

"How's that for a name? If it's a boy, I mean." Star said.

Eva laughed, not looking up from her purple phone. "Sounds pretentious."

"Nice use of vocab." I told her, smiling.

Eva stuck her pink tongue out at me playfully, then returned to her phone. I was almost positive she had a boyfriend. I could feel jealousy rising into my throat.

"Ceminsk?" Star asked to no one.

"How about Lucifer Satan Damien. You could call him LSD for short." I said.

Star made a face. "You don't know how important a name is to a child."

"Nope." I said.

"Moon never wants to have kids." Eva said.

"Really?" Star was asking Eva instead of me, even though I was standing right there.

Eva nodded.

"Truth," I said anyways.

"Well that's just sad. Kids are people too. Just little people."

"No," I said getting up, not even sure if I exist. "Kids are small animals. Like dogs. Except if I back over my dog in my driveway, I won't go to jail."

Eva laughed, finally putting away her phone. She was watching me closely, like a specimen.

I stomp on a cardboard box, crushing it beneath my feet. Restless, I wonder around and smoke a cigarette. Eva returned to her phone again, and star hums softly in the silence.

"Can I have one?" Star asked after a while, motioning to my cigarette.

"You're pregnant." Eva looks up and answers for me.

"Listen to Eva." I said.

"So what, just one, please?" Star was talking to Eva again, even though I was standing right there.

"No."

"I'll empty all the trash for you." Star begged.

"Does dipshit know?" I asked.

"Who?"

"Your boyfriend." Eva answered for me.

"No, he doesn't want me to smoke. But please, I'll empty all the trashes the next two times we work together!"

I looked at Eva, beautiful Eva with her young blonde hair falling over her shoulder, her devious smile toying and crippling my reason as her pink thong rode up her ass. I inhaled deeply on my cigarette and blow it towards the two young women. I'm getting paid to be some type of role model to them, and all I can think about is a vagina and a fucking doomed fetus inside another vagina.

Shit.

"Eva, have a cigarette." I said, throwing my pack to her.

"Eva, can I have a cigarette?" Star asked her immediately.

"No." Eva said.

"Moon?" Star begged.

"Ask Eva."

"Evelyn, please?"

"No."

"Moon, I'll empty the trash and count all the draws for you the next week!"

"You can have the rest of mine." I said, handing it to her.

"Thanks!" She exclaimed.

"Just empty the trash tonight." I ordered Star.

"Deal."

Something close to tired, I sat down next to Eva, and she handed me my cigarettes back. Star wandered around, humming and smoking near the fire exit. Eva and I looked at each other like two parents out of ideas of discipline for a rebellious youth. I didn't feel like telling her any jokes or discussing the modern drug culture or high school sex scene, so I pulled out my note pad and drew a pound sign so we could play Tic-Tac-Toe against each other.