Re: Queens: Wren & Saint.
"He doesn't have shoes." This was Wren's answer, and perhaps it spoke of mothering. Shoes, they hadn't been a concern when she'd known Saint first. Heavy belly and hungry, sick and no food to eat. Then it had been day, day, day, stay awake, stay alive, and she hadn't really cared to do either. She wouldn't have noticed a boy with no shoes then, and maybe it said something about aging, parenting and a life lived in a pretty house with white walls and soup bubbling warm on the stove. Things were bad and wrong, and dead things lurked in and out, but the boy had no shoes. He should have shoes, and that was simplicity and no judgement for the deals conducted by little hands in order to eat.
She knew this world. She'd maybe forgotten, her camera pointed at models that were skinny, skinny from elbow to soul. They snorted white and swallowed pills, those girls, and all to stay awake, to stay so thin that they'd be lost sideways. It was a different world, those bright lights and false laughs. Selling beauty, and Wren didn't want to go back to it. This was bad, but it was honest. It was deeds done to bring food to hungry lips. It was real, even in filth, and she didn't mind filth.
She was supposed to be at the playground, and she knew that. Somewhere in the back of her mind, that truth lived, but she just followed the boy to a door. He knocked, and he wasn't careful. He didn't ensure he wasn't being followed, and bright sunshine yellow was something he didn't know, and so he didn't see.
But the man that opened the door, he saw. Wren, still lost behind her lens, snapped a picture of the man. Brown eyes deep as night, and hair shaved close. Tattoos on his neck and knuckles, and a white t-shirt that hung loose past jeans belted low. His sneakers gleamed, and the boy slipped past him, and Wren focused on Nike swish, and snapped another picture, this one of bare feet slipping past those incomparably white sneakers.