Snake Eyes

When Ella was small she never thought about how strange her life was. It was all that she had ever known and even as she grew older and saw how different everyone else lived it didn’t make her want to copy them. She wasn’t unhappy with the way that she lived, even if it was different.

Ella lived with the old woman, she had no idea what the woman’s name was. The woman never spoke to her, nor held her but Ella could only assume the woman took care of her when she was a baby because she had survived and there was no one else. There was never any affection in the old woman’s face, but nor was there dislike and she fed Ella and made sure that she had clothing which Ella took to be a sign of some sort of caring.

Of course since the old woman never spoke Ella hadn’t needed a name until she had gotten old enough to wander on her own, and then she had simply chosen a random name she had decided that she liked. If she remembered right she had heard a man calling a little girl about her age Ella and had decided that that was what she was going to be named.

Ella and the old woman lived in an old alley that was no longer in use by anyone, forgotten and covered by the growth of the city. There behind a dumpster that no one had used in ten years there was a nest of blankets. The old woman never left that nest and it would seem that she was always cold because she wore multiple mismatched layers, even in the heat of the summer.

Even though the old woman never left her nest she always seemed to have food and clothing for both of them. The quality would vary however. Some days she would have fresh bread, juice, wine, fruit as good as if it had just been picked, some days she would have nothing but a moldy crust and water. The same went for the clothing she would provide when they needed it, sometimes Ella could dress in the latest fashions, and sometimes she was dressed in little better then rags. Of course as Ella grew older she started to provide partly for herself, with what she could find. She never begged or stole because she was always afraid that would attract the officials to her and she would be sent to live at a shelter or a home, but she would pick up what other people dropped or threw away. The old woman would never wear what Ella would bring back, nor eat what Ella could find, but she never seemed to mind if Ella provided for herself.

The only item of any real note on the old woman was a pair of earrings that she never took off. They looked like a pair of dice and Ella had learned how to count by looking at them when she was little. As she grew older she noticed that the dice didn’t always show the same numbers. She got in the habit of telling the old woman what number was showing. Sometimes the old woman smiled, sometimes she frowned, and sometimes she looked annoyed with Ella for bothering her.

One morning, when Ella was about sixteen, she looked over to see what the woman’s earrings were showing and then looked again. Two ones were showing, one on each earring, it had never happened before. She reached over and flicked one of the earrings and the old woman frowned at her. Ella didn’t pay her any attention though. The earring Ella had flicked spun for a short time, and then returned to the number one.

“You have two ones on your earrings,” Ella told the old woman. The woman looked at her for a moment, and then nodded. She didn’t look happy, or sad, or annoyed, she simply nodded as if something had been decided. Ella shrugged, she didn’t care for mysteries and she wasn’t going to waste her energy trying to solve this one. Especially since the old woman never told her anything.

Ella went out as usual that day, and had unusually good luck finding food. A little family owned grocery had been sorting through its inventory and had thrown an unusually large amount of only slightly expired food into its dumpster. Ella was in high spirits, and had forgotten all about the earrings, when she returned to their nest behind the dumpster. She was soon reminded however. The old woman was gone and the only thing that remained in the nest of blankets was the earrings, still showing the two ones.

Ella cried, wrapped in the blankets. She couldn’t have said why she cried, since she had never felt overly close to the woman. But the woman had always been there and now she was gone. There was never any doubt in Ella’s mind that the old woman was dead, even though there was no sign of the body. Ella had seen rats crawl out of their holes to die and, never having seen a human die, she could only assume that they did the same. Ella clasped the earrings in her hand until they dug into the skin, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t crying for the woman, she was crying for herself who for the first time ever was truly alone.

It wasn’t until Ella had cried herself into exhaustion that she realized she hadn’t been the only one crying. Nearby there was the sound of a new born baby crying, in a place where no one went other then herself and the old woman there was the sound of a new life. Ella pulled herself out of the nest and trying to see through puffy red eyes, she followed the sound.

The baby was lying on the doorstep of an abandoned building. There was a bottle next to it, and it was dressed as if it had been dropped there on its way home from the hospital. Ella bent down and picked it up gently. From the pink cap on its head she assumed it was a girl. As she bent down to pick up the baby she let the earrings slip from her hand and she left them lay there as she walked away softly crooning. They showed a four and a three.