C
HERISH BIT HER white lips. She was torn between going through the door, which was simply marked "409," or walking back out into the frigid Manhattan night. A wicked wind whipped between the mile-high apartment house and attacked her thin coat. Stars, like forlorn chips of ice, blinked bleakly at her from far above.
In answer to her timid knock on the door, a rough, gruff older man, with grey hair and kind, crinkly blue eyes, bade her welcome and waved her towards a heavily-laden sideboard which groaned under the weight of great platters of prepared foods.
Anyone who might have seen the tears welling up in Cherish's huge, hungry brown eyes would have assumed
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violet-hued hills of Scotland, wher she had live in a rundown clapboard house.
While only a member of a dirt poor farming family, she and her nine younger brothers and sisters had been rich in warmth, love, good food and clean clothes, as provided by her angel-eyed mother and ever-smiling daddy.
Having just finished her required schooling, Cherish was offered a scholarship in wrestling, a sport in which she'd always excelled.
However, being adventurous (and, as she later ruefully admitted, foolish), Cherish cried and cajoled until her parents signed the papers to permit her to come to America, as arranged by the "Exchange Helper" organization.
The agreement was that she would have her fare paid to
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Cherish sits on top of Aria, ren-dering
her helpless (above). Aria returns to
lock Cherish in a crude but effective
spinebender (below). |
THE GHASTLY WAR IN
APARTMENT 409 |
they'd been formed by the treacherous wind battering furiously against the patio doors.
Only Cherish could know that she was nearly overwhelmed by the desire to cry in great, gulping sobs, as a child would. It was nearly two years since she'd been in the presence of so much food.
Could it really be only 21 months since she'd been home?
How often in the recent past she'd dreamed of her home, a place in the heather-blown, |
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the Midwest by an American family, who'd also be required to pay her 10 dollars a week and provide her room and board. In exchange for this, Cherish was to help run the American family's home.
However, reality differed greatly from the conditions promised by the organization.
The family, headed by a tight-lipped, humorless man, ran a farm. Cherish was forced to work the fields, bailing hay, tending livestock and doing heavy work.
During the times she was |
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