She walks toward me in the bar on 28th street, and I glance in her eyes and see the expired contacts peer out at me from her listless pupils and cataracts. I see regret fogging the edges of her irises and the loss of what could have been a long and wealthy life to her father. He was terrible, I can see a belt flying through the air and landing on a teenage girl that snuck out one night she tried to leave but he kept her hidden in his broken beer bottles and white lies, the lies keep scratching at her throat shes sick oh shes so ill she needs a doctor, all skin and bones and her mother is crying and her breath is dying and her father is lying to the social worker at the door. she tries to scream but her cracked desert of a throat gives away and her mother hands her a cigarette and she inhales and vomits and her mother is screaming about wasting a good cigarette and a meal too but this girl's eyes are fading and the maggots wriggle under her skin and she’s lying on the floor and rotting, her lungs are back but she’s whispering to me about a boy that took her innocence away at fifteen, and how he called her a ***** and threw her dignity away, now she’s muttering about a baby that wasn’t supposed to be born and a man that hurt her hurt her and killed the baby and how the sister her sister and now she’s out of breath and wheezing about how her sister went to harvard and while she raked the yard her sister graduated and made a beautiful career and now she’s screaming at me with the last ounce of life that her father is dead and all she ever does is sit inside with her mother, smoking and reading last weeks newspapers but now her mother is dead and this is her first time out alone. She tells me this, with only her eyes.