Hey everyone. This is pure experimentation; I haven't done anything like this before. Tell me what you think, and feel free to rip it apart.
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Beggars swarm the streets of London. The flock from whatever decrepit corners of world in which they breed to infiltrate the pathways of the well-to-do. They badger us with their pathetic stares and incoherent pleas as they sit in their own filth or else stand aimlessly upon the sidewalk. It disgusts me to see them. But Cathy Roberts has always been the austere, narrow-minded sort, and she insists upon walking to the Turner’s. She lectures that fresh air and exercise improve the mind, or the body, or something or other.
Dear Aunt Cathy is a frugal old prude. She dresses cleverly enough, to make up for what she lacks in plainness of face. She speaks and acts reasonably; in fact, I think she looks to Reason as the center point of her existence. I have never failed to see why she remains a spinster.
As much of a bore she altogether is, she remains a better companion that a number of my other alternatives in the house. In her reserved, taciturn nature she is tolerable. But she insists upon walking to the vagrant-infested neighborhoods of the bourgeoisie – for that is what the Turners are: bourgeoisie. Upper bourgeoisie, though, as they take care to remind one. I understand the benefits of making contacts within their class, but you still wouldn’t see a beggar on the streets on the way to our neighborhoods.
So that is where I am now: walking to the home of a Bourgeoisie, with dear Aunt Cathy by my side, down a beggar-infested street. We have seen two of them thus far.
Orderly shops in red brick line the street, though of course their owners live upstairs. Neatly dressed shoppers share our path as they travel from store to store. Dear Aunt Cathy has some dogma about fresh air doing me good, but I can barely breathe in this industrial, foul smog. There are no factories nearby, but there may as well be. I think it sickens dear Aunt Cathy too, for she has her nose wrinkled up in her disapproved way, but she remains stubbornly silent.
We have just passed by a tailor’s when I see our third beggar. Fittingly, she is dressed from head to toe in brown rags. She can’t be much older than me, mid-twenties at the latest. A baby wails in her arms.
Usually when I see a member of the lower class, I can tell if they possess features with the potential to be handsome. I imagine them in the proper clothes and attire and think, if that person had been born in the right class, she could have done well. I do pity them that, that lost potential and opportunity.
But I cannot even tell if this girl would be ugly or handsome. Her mousy brown hair tangles about her face and her eyes are wild. The baby cries louder, and I can tell with one glance it is sickly, not likely to survive the week.
The girl’s eyes bore into my own. Most of her kind seem lost and distant, meandering about, but she is focused, determined. She pleads with me through her haunting eyes, which seem to express a thousand different words and emotions. She hasn’t looked once at Aunt Cathy but focuses solely on me.
I am chilled by her gaze but have done or said nothing. She stands directly in our path, her baby still wailing, her eyes still on me, and we continue walking toward her. Aunt Cathy remains briskly determined to arrive at our destination and ignores the person in front of us.
We are now just a few yards from her. My feet unconsciously slow down as we continue to move ahead, and then she speaks.
“Please,” she says, her voice quiet, raspy.
I just stare at her, my face unfeeling and aloof. We keep walking, and she stares back.
We pass by her, leave her in our wake. We are the well-bred. We don’t humor beggars.
The vermin.
