Some Back Alley
Late at night, Some Time In January


<a href='https://i.imgsafe.org/d1f30ea9ac.jpg' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Smile.</a> That was the first rule of being nice. Smile. Be pleasant. Don't talk about weird things. Don't talk about bad things. Be pleasant. Smile. It was the mantra Parissa repeated to herself as she wandered the back alley. There was a stiletto hidden up her sleeve, just in case, but on the whole she was trying to just clear her head. The walk was good, and the cold stone under her bare feet was giving her clarity. There were demons swirling in her head, memories she had thought long dead, and she needed a moment to return herself to her appropriate mindset. Memories of her brothers, their faces blurred by time but their wounds still painfully fresh-- and the smell of blood, curdled in the sun, turned black as it coagulated on exposed muscle--

The death that ensued, the line she stood in, watching the village elders be put to the sword-- and the screams from family and friends-- those who had tried to resist-- Parissa clutched her head and stumbled into the wall, clenching her eyes tightly. The memories kept coming, unbidden, fresh and blurry from the haze of history. Faces blurred, melted, the skin running down their bone, their screams echoing out across the tired plains-- the animals, bleating and groaning in agony-- the Quran on the ground, dusty, defiled-- her foot-- her foot!--

She stopped moving, staying pressed against the wall and breathing hard. Her memories never ceased, not before The Moment. Even as the jeering skulls of her family and her village mocked her, laughing in their screams, gurgling mirthfully on mouthfuls of blood, their bloated tongues and swollen eyes on all sides of her, even as the cavalcade of corpses swirled about her, that man--his face entirely obscured by history, her mind entirely incapable of conjuring up even the most basic attributes of his visage--pulled his whip back...!

Crack.

The pain ran down the full length of her scar, sending her back arching and a little gag of agony scurrying from her throat. The mechanisms of her mind began to work again, the dam opened and the water wheels allowed to turn. Slowly she could open her eyes and stumble off from the masonry, her gait unsteady. Smile. That was the important thing. She had to smile. She had to be pleasant. The cold radiating through her feet was nothing compared to everything else. The cold was nothing compared to the heat, the hot rock she climbed up and down as a child, the sensation of jagged stone piercing the nerve-laden skin of her sole and sending salt deep into her as a result. The cold was nothing compared to the sensation of a fish hook through her breast, a 'joke' from one of the sailors she'd rejected.

The cold was nothing compared to the memory of crawling to her death, the congealed blood along her wound cracking painfully and allowing fresh crimson to bubble out like sap from a tree. The final fluttering of her adolescent eyes--

A child interrupted her, pushing her from her psychotic reverie. It asked a question in the demon tongue this city operated on. Kneeling down, Parissa smiled--always smiling, that was the key after all!--into its face and tilted her head to the side. "Forgive, bambino. What ask?" Her Italian was broken, stunted. She'd been learning rapidly, but Parissa wasn't far along her lessons yet. The child repeated its dumb little question and Parissa's smile took a hollowness to it. How... intriguing.

Glancing around, Parissa attempted to locate the parents. She had nothing akin to love or warmth, but the child was irking her and being able to at least berate the parents in a loud tone, even if her language was unknown to them, had a certain appeal to it. But the child appeared to be alone. What was it offering? What did it want? Standing up, Parissa started to explore the alleyways branching off of where she stood. But a gentle tug at her side brought her eyes quite immediately back down towards the kid. With tears in its eyes, it repeated its bleating, mewling out some string of noises Parissa couldn't possibly understand. Something akin to disgust rose through her throat, and she was tempted--as she always was tempted when near children--to strike it.

"What do you want?" she demanded in Arabic, finally exasperated enough to speak without meaning to a child. More bleating from the kid. Pulling her head back, clamping a finger over the bridge of her nose and trying hard to deal with the intense dislike growing in her soul, Parissa physically recoiled when the filthy thing touched her again. Leaping backwards, she glowered down at the sobbing mass of dirtied flesh and unkempt hair. There was a certain... emaciated look to it. It hadn't gotten adequate food in some time, from the looks of things, and the swelling of its belly indicated it was starting to undergo the more severe components of starvation. Perhaps it was plagued.

A darkness came over her countenance. The blade fell slowly down into her hand, her arm moving behind her back not to alert the thing to her intention. Kneeling back down, she extended her knifeless hand to the waif. "You're hurt," she cooed, speaking in French now. "Come, little child. I won't bite." Not a lie, she had no intention of biting. That would require her to put something diseased and dirty in her mouth, and Parissa had higher standards than that now. She wasn't trapped on a desert island, just a watery one. The child-thing took a step closer, clearly confused and uncertain.

It took another step closer. Parissa continued to smile. That was, after all, the secret to being nice. Smiling. It was so important to smile, to keep her eyelids wide (but not too wide), to keep her head mostly straight but not too tilted to either side, and definitely not so straight that it felt artificial. Parissa kept her breathing level, since too quick a breath could be construed as exhilaration and that could trigger fear, while too slow could be seen as overly relaxed and therefore trigger suspicion. She had to blink regularly, as well, since too many blinks were seen as a sign of nervousness and too few were seen as a sign of inhumanity. And Parissa even policed her eyes, keeping her eyes pointed on one of its. If she switched from one to the other, it seemed like nervousness or anxiety. If she didn't look it in the eyes, it was a sign of guilt or a heavy conscience.

The waif was near enough to her now. "Good." How easy it would be, to push the stiletto through the taut skin about its ribs, to shove steel through its heart and allow it to escape the pain of the world in a few mournful beats? How nice it would be, for it to escape the agony of the world?

Parissa's hand came from behind her back and she punched the waif in the forehead. With the added weight from the pommel, the child fell like a sack of potatoes--the very item the child would dream about in its nearly unconscious state. With the sound of head hitting stone, Parissa stood, shook the feeling back into her hand, and continued on her way through the alley. The child would live, she presumed. If it had parents, they would find it back there. And if it didn't, if nothing in the world cared for it, the dogs would find it sooner rather than later.

The world was a cruel place. The secret was to just keep smiling.