Cass & Burden: the Mean Eyed Cat
She slipped the locks that night. It was effortful. It took cheeking pills for days and days until a little flicker, a kernel of who she was kindled as if from wet wood, until she had enough of herself to see a little of the guard. He touched the girls indiscriminately so it was little effort after that to have him touch her. His hand glanced the bare skin of her wrist and Cass's spine spasmed, she uncurled straight, gave him a smile as soft as butter and told him things he needn't otherwise have known. She cradled the part of herself that was truly her, instead of gray and damp like winter air and she slipped the locks with his help, the guard who would otherwise have taken a girl that evening and who thought instead of his family.
She'd rallied clothes, in the locker that was hers in the diner. They were sequestered, bought in dribs and drabs with tips secreted into a pocket and all of them had belonged to other people once. When Cass arrived at the bar she wore soft white and her hair after months and months inside was dull, gold-brown like weed from the lake. She remembered sunshine, she remembered the turn of the year with salt on her mouth and the sharp, stinging cold of the ocean. Cass smiled all at once as she crossed the bar's threshold, like flowering. It was bright, kitsch and wonderful. She settled upon wonderful, and it was kindling for the spark of herself that remained stubbornly lit in spite of itself. There was much to live on, in spite, but wonderful was all the more sustaining.
She wore no gloves, she'd no need to for months and months but her sleeves were unbuttoned and loose at the wrists and overlong. They dragged a little, but it served the purpose. Cass threw fond glance toward the jostle of the pool table, and the heat climbed her back and fanned across her skin and she felt warm, truly warm for the first time in weeks. When she sat, it was deliberate. At the bar, with her flat shoes, thin at the sole hooked onto a stool. The man behind the bar was singing, the sweetness of it belying the rough smoke of the man on the record, Cash, and Cass poured her cheek into her palm, her elbow on the bar and looked at the bottles behind his head.