Post by missionhill on Feb 3, 2013 6:55:39 GMT -5
Last time I walked down the hill to Roxbury Crossing a Los V soldier and her warhund yelled at me. "Don't touch him!" they growled at me. The him was my old boss - his family ran the Bubble Tea carts. One summer I served out the tea at the Copley. My father couldn't look me in the eye that summer. He didn't trust Yakuza.
I asked Dad if he knew any better way I could make an honest cred. He choked back his ready-prep vudka and shrugged. He needed a 12 hour nap before he could think up a smart reply.
My older sister stood in the second floor kitchen with me and said, "We're lucky, you know."
I sighed. She was right. Dad was born Los V. That made us girls Los V property. But Dad always shouldered his way in between the Los V thugs. Another failed attempt to"collect" his girls.
That day down at the Roxbury Crossing tracks, I went to look for antique glass bottles and aluminum cans to decorate our garden. It was easy to find them. Most everything near the hill was built on hundred year old layers of cement stubble and dirt fill.
My sister pieced together the bits of soft glass I found. She wrapped the glass into small domes. Not like the dome over our city which no one can see. (We only are told it is there.) My sister's domes looked like the old church windows. Except hers were tri-color helmets. Blue, green, frosted white, twined with wire guts of broken maglocks.
She called them cold frames - we used them to force start rose clippings - She said, under domes everything gets roots. Finding the roses was always easy. We'd go further up the hill to the south and west. It was best in December when the Los V bosses were sleeping away their lunches full of grits and grease. We cut a few stems from everyone's rose bushes. Some stems had already fallen. These were the easiest to salvage.
... end chapter one.... tbc...
I asked Dad if he knew any better way I could make an honest cred. He choked back his ready-prep vudka and shrugged. He needed a 12 hour nap before he could think up a smart reply.
My older sister stood in the second floor kitchen with me and said, "We're lucky, you know."
I sighed. She was right. Dad was born Los V. That made us girls Los V property. But Dad always shouldered his way in between the Los V thugs. Another failed attempt to"collect" his girls.
That day down at the Roxbury Crossing tracks, I went to look for antique glass bottles and aluminum cans to decorate our garden. It was easy to find them. Most everything near the hill was built on hundred year old layers of cement stubble and dirt fill.
My sister pieced together the bits of soft glass I found. She wrapped the glass into small domes. Not like the dome over our city which no one can see. (We only are told it is there.) My sister's domes looked like the old church windows. Except hers were tri-color helmets. Blue, green, frosted white, twined with wire guts of broken maglocks.
She called them cold frames - we used them to force start rose clippings - She said, under domes everything gets roots. Finding the roses was always easy. We'd go further up the hill to the south and west. It was best in December when the Los V bosses were sleeping away their lunches full of grits and grease. We cut a few stems from everyone's rose bushes. Some stems had already fallen. These were the easiest to salvage.
... end chapter one.... tbc...
