Jorjian Brown was born on the cusp of uproar and downfall. Only one year shy of nineteen thirty, to be exact. She was a slimy beast that had crawled out of the underbelly’s belly—as her father had put it. There was not much to Jorjian. Her hair was cropped short by the age of ten. She had a square jaw and a snaggletooth grin. Her comical side was limited. To her, funny was a rainbow screwed on backwards. To her, Buckley County was as flashy as the Rivera. And brut beer was as potent as a falsetto throat tightening to a muscly cord within the clasped hands of a purple coin ringer. Things looked pigeon-eyed to Jorjian. And life was a hijinx to Jorjian. And Moe at the corner pawnshop was never very far from her shoulder, careful to keep a watchful eye on the bird of his master’s protection. Moe and Mickey, they slithered through the grime of Boylston and Pine, knocking hoes and bunnies and boppin them on the head. Two hoes, three hoes, a pair of toes. Sold for a gold chain and a can of gummies. No one stopped to listen when Jorjian Brown tussled her head from side to side. She smiled and sat. Smiled and sat. Kissed and spat. Never looked back.

And from whence she withdrew a cornering stare, a young man approached, willing to try her. A Capitol Hill smacker with gums long and saggy. Jorjian would have none of it. But he commenced to concede Jorjian’s mind for her, a sly grimace paying no matter. What he willed to have, he certainly got. Her cropped bangs stuck to the cheek of her forehead. What a pallor she contained after such an affront. But Jorjian stared past her prowler. She put up an image of days in the valley. Alone with her mother, her maker, but sadly, things came crashing back as the wolf had just spat in the face of his prey. Jorjian wrestled with what to do, it was custom of her to ripen another with dew. She was trapped and saddened by her life’s noxious state. She lifted her skirt further and offered what of her was left. Jorjian Brown then caved forever into the hole in her breast.

It seemed there was no hope for a girl left to her own. Not in a city both gray and fertile. Not in a city full of fuel and rock. Ms. Brown had been left, alone on the beach. A forgetful image of a year downed by the dismal stocks of the east. The bells of New York ringing up and down as the markets sank and set forth. No one thought of Jorjian as her body grew soft. The ice salt of Alki washed her skin clean. And no one, not Moe, not Mickey, no one from home called out the name to which she knew best. It seemed she had never set foot in the barber chair that day. Never ate a lollypop from that corner store. Never drank a sticky drink from that barstool. She had never lived atop the hill that now rested in silence of fog and fall. It seemed Jorjian Brown, was never at all.