Who Will She Be Tonight?

"Just leave the money on the dresser when we're done."

After she said that, he put himself heavily on top of her so that she could barely breathe, and he was drunk.

It was the same man every night in the way that it began the same, stayed the same in the middle, and ended the same. Each man had a different name but the weight and the cash was the same.

She herself was not the same woman every night. Last night when the man was on top of her in his hated heaviness, she was an opera singer on a stage receiving roses and applause and blown kisses. The night before that, she was a glamorous starlet loved by all her adoring fanatics lined up for autographs, pictures, or even a polite hello or catching of the eye.

Tonight she was a queen with subjects doing her every whim, fetching a buggy with six white horses, rolling red carpets, bows and curtsies from the peasants she detested. She was far from them. They could only imagine her palace, and she could only imagine that their squalor was less than broadcast. Her pampered hands never touched them, and they were never allowed to touch her. She rode through the villages and waved her white gloved hand with a painted smile, and wasn't she a wonderful queen to behold.

The heavy weight left her body and the room. She rolled off the bed, tucked away her money, and waited for tomorrow night.

The end