Down here in these trenches lives a girl. She told me to call her Layla. Her skin deep beauty left awhile back. All that remains is a gray leather shell and purple and yellow track marks on her legs and forearms.

She hopes to get a job at Burger King. Right now she’s living in a motel, two-hundred dollars a week.

Smoking a menthol outside the Sunoco and asking me for spare change, offering blowjobs for twenty dollars and talking to me about her little girl. The baby lives with Layla’s mom. The baby-daddy died last year from a heroin overdose.

She hopes the fast food job will help her bring her baby to the motel with her.

I pass a comment, unintentionally glib, sincere I thought, about aiming higher than Burger King.

She looks me cold in the eye and says, “Old man, you don’t know shit about low. Maybe you think you know low. Trust me, I’ll dream the best day of my life to see your lowest day.

“We live right the fuck out here among you, every day you walk by. We are here. We are living and breathing and dying right here. Don’t think you are better than me, life has just been kinder to you.”

I remembered the frozen faces of Dicken’s Ignorance and Want clinging to the robe of the ghost.

I gave her twenty bucks, passing on the blowjob.

She was right.