The girl could feel her heart beating faster and stronger, pumping up and down in her chest as though it was trying to climb out from under her ribcage.  She began taking a tentative step forward but held her foot in midair, unable to move away from the woman standing next to her.  She looked over a the tall slender figure standing just beside her.  The woman, clad in high heels and painfully thin, looked down at her impatiently.  "Well, go ahead."  The child put her foot back down without moving an inch in the direction the woman was pointing.  "It’s too dark."  The woman rolled her eyes and fished a lighter out of her pocket, striking the flint and handing it to her young daughter as the flame shot up from the wick.  "Here. "  She reached forward to grab the object in her mother’s hand.

She caught a glimpse then; a fleeting look at her mothers fingers.  They appeared uncharacteristically dirty, and more boney than she’d ever remembered them.  The thin fingers shifted on the lighter.  She picked the lighter up a little too high and shifted her grip on it immediately letting out a small cry as she felt the heat sear her skin.  Her mother looked startled for a moment, then irritated.  "Careful kid!  It’s hot you’ll burn your hand.  How many times have I told you to be careful with you hands.  They’re too nice to go ruining like that."

The woman grabbed her daughter’s free hand and examined it in her own for a moment.  The child too, looked down to where flesh met flesh.  Her own hands were strong and smooth.  Her pale, long fingers stretched out steadily, without the slightest hint of movement.  In comparison her mothers hands were splotchy with dead blood vessels.  They shared the same long, slender fingers, but her mothers were gnarled by years of exposure and calloused beyond any hope of tenderness.  The nails were dirty and yellowed from cigarettes, and her hand shook with tremors, a characteristic mark of her overall unsteadiness.

"Those hands…" her mother had a wistful look in her eye, as though she was somewhere else completely.  "You could be a artist or a sculptor with those hands.  I used to have hands like those you know.  I could hold them steady for hours.  I was going to be a hairdresser."  The woman sighed and put a hand on her daughters chin, picking up her face so it was staring straight at her.  The child looked apprehensive and vulnerable, her tenderness the only thing betraying her femininity.  No one would have guessed this was the woman’s daughter.  At almost ten years old she was peculiarly skinny and angular; an almost grotesque beauty to her face that was more striking than delicate.  Tall and gangly, (in a way that was painfully reminiscent, to her mother, of the man who’d fathered her), but petite, the child betrayed no signs of her true gender.  Truth be told, that fact had probably kept her relatively safe while traveling in the circles her mother moved them amongst.  Lord only knew what happened to little girls, in the places they had been together, when mother’s like her weren’t around.