Secondary Education, Chapter 11, Is This Nirvana?

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Secondary Education
Tyla Flowers
[email protected]
Tyla awakens from her surgery radically altered physically, but her squalid world is unchanged.

Is This Nirvana?
Chapter 11

I awaken with a shudder. A fractured ray of sunlight pierces the crack between a pair threadbare quilts which have been hung as an makeshift curtain. From outside I hear the clamor of banda piped through the tinny speakers of a catering truck. A hot breeze wafts a rancid flume of stale cooking oil, jalapeno and stewed pork. I feel nauseous, and choke back a heave.
I have mind-splitting headache, cotton mouth and my lower back is sore and tight. My throat is parched and hoarse, as though I have I screamed too loud, for too long. I don’t recognize the water stained ceiling above me, or the dingy sarape that covers me. I have no idea where I am, or how I got here.
I lift up my head and push up on my elbows. Two molten balls of liquid metal explode against my chest and force me back to the mattress. I lie still, waiting for the sputtering caldrons to cool. I squint through crusted-closed eyes. The sarape is gathered into a ridge that blocks the room beyond. I push it back, and stare at two large, bruised globes of flesh, forced together in a sweat-stained sports bra.
I scrape a crust of yesterday’s eyeliner and sleepy dust from my lashes, blink my bleary vision clear and focus on the strange mounds ascending from my chest like a pair of newly formed volcanoes. Am I still dreaming? I lift my hands and touch them. Hot lava roils inside me, and I am blind again from a scalding wave of pain. I behold a pair big, round tits on my chest.
They feel hot and gravid, ready to erupt.
I think back at stealthy hours I have spent surfing the internet to research the types of implants, the methods of implantation, and the insurmountable barriers of cost and recovery time. I have calculated how many tricks I will have to turn to get $6700 that the best surgeons charge for the boobs I want: 400 cc High Profile Textured Round Silicone.
How many nights have I dreamed of a sugardaddy who sends to a posh clinic on Canon Drive? In my fantasy, my benefactor pays for the procedure, the pleasant spa where I will recover, and sends flower, candy and love notes. I imagine myself walking down Rodeo, swaying in my Jimmy Choos, anatomically perfect, elegant, and graceful boobs lurching a bit with every step, like Halle Berry’s.
I compare my dream with reality, and jagged fragments of memory return. Roberto told me he would do something special for me, that I would be cut and pumped. I realize that I have Mara boobs, and I am a captive in one of their safe houses. I am locked in a hot, smelly room, in a bad part of town, languishing on a lumpy cot.
My dreams are fulfilled as a ghetto nightmare. My new boobs are round and fat, like the eye catching blobs of a Mexican streetwalker. Have I been pumped, injected with a toxic brew of industrial oils? Or are they used implants that some Mara soldier carved from the corpse of a dead whore and stuffed under my skin?
I jostle them, and when they jiggle, they send a clarion warning of pain. They are so heavy, and so tender, that I cannot lift my torso up from the mattress. But I have to pee. If I don’t get up, I will wet the bed. The prospect of smelly, sodden sheets impels me to move. I steady my new boobs with my hands and try to roll onto my side and out of bed.
As my legs scissor against one another, another rapier slashes through my groin, recalling the horrible morning when some boys at Fairfax caught me peeing sitting down on the toilet, and took turns kicking and stomping my groin until I passed out. I almost faint again.
I roll painfully back onto the bed, and cautiously explore my anatomy. I grope over the smooth skin of my abdomen and graze around. My groin is clad in elastic underwear, which encases my privates. I poke my hand underneath into a tuft of bloody gauze, searching out the source of the radiating pain. I find the tip of my cock, and walk my fingertips back toward my ass. When I touch my scrotum, I yelp. It’s swollen and the gauze is soggy with blood and slick with ointment.
At the centerline, of my scrotum, I encounter a fringe of spiky filaments, the tied off ends of a line of short line of sutures. I finger them gingerly, and spread my fingers to probe the swollen flesh of my scrotum. Black holes of pain swallow my consciousness. From the abyss I deduce the meaning of the strange new landscape between my legs. My balls are gone. I am castrated.
The ceiling stains pulsate and swirl, like the changing boundaries and rules of my startling new reality. My new tits and the castration site throb with each anxious pulse beat. My most exotic and dangerous fantasies have been fulfilled. I am big-boobed and ball-less.
Since I was about 9 have been fantasizing about implants and castration and a sex change operations, but I have been scared to go full time. I like playing with hormones and getting used as a sex toy by bad boys, but until this morning, I could bind my little B-Cups, put on baggie sweats and sneakers, and pass as a slightly effeminate boy. I could go places as Tyler the morning after Tyla, dressed up like a whore, had given blowjobs or gotten fucked by ten guys she had picked up on the streets. I was comfortable with my ladyboy whoring because I knew I could stop if I decided to be a boy. Most of the effects of hormones are reversible. Six months after you stop taking estrogen and anti androgens, the boobies are gone, the balls grow back and start spewing testosterone, and you can be a bad boy yourself. And the trannie’s life is such a pain in the ass, pun intended, that I sometimes considered going back.
Now, my last exit from a total transition is foreclosed. No more can I slip back into being Tyler and masquerade as a boy. If my dad ever gets out of prison, or my mom survives her most recent junkie binge, they will have to accept me as Tyla, their busty and beautiful daughter. My cousins in Fresno will have to lust over me as a girl, and my step brothers somewhere in Cambodia will have accept or reject me as a sister. I can never go back to being Tyler.
I got shoved through the door to full time transsexuality by the Mara. Roberto drugged, cut and pumped me. I am his bitch now. I stifle back a sob of regret, and try to calm myself. I tried to escape them, but I am just as powerless to resist the Mara as I was to resist my own urges. To be a big breasted trannie bottom whore was my dream, my karma, and now I have gotten it.
I cradle my boobs in one hand and my wounded scrotum in the other and arise. As I do, I discover more incisions in my arm pits, radiating agony with every movement of my arms. Bloodstained bandages are taped there. When I try to lift my arms to inspect them, my boobs smolder intensely. I have to hold my arms like a robot when I walk.
There are a couple of bottles of water and a collection of pill bottles on a shabby linoleum table, and a scribbled note: “Take one of each for pain and to prevent infection. Apply ointment and new bandages to your surgical sites. No shower.” I gingerly let go of my groin, and breasts. As they droop they seem to explode, and I carefully swallow two of the Percocet, a Diane-35 and an Amoxicillin and stagger to the bathroom.
The door is off its hinges, the toilet seat is loose and filthy, and the toilet paper is soggy from sitting in a puddle beside the stool. I pee, and the cut behind my cock sizzles with pain. The sink is broken, and I wipe my hands with a nearly empty bottle of Purel. I peel off the gauze between my legs. Contact with the air intensifies the post-surgical pain. The bandage is a smeary collage of orange Betadine and blood. I swipe a fresh line of ointment on my incision, smear more on fresh gauze, and pull up the elastic panties to press the bandage firmly into my slaughtered groin. There’s nothing I can do with the armpits. I can’t reach them I gingerly stagger back to my bed.
I look around my little prison, and pull open the improvised curtains. Flies flit against the tattered screen. Outside, a trash strewn street lined with battered stucco bungalows. I am deep within the Mara’s realm.
I notice a hummock under the sheets on the other cot. I walk over and pull the sheets aside. It’s Patty. Her face is pallid, and her brow is damp and cool. She does not respond to my stroke. I shake her, and her head lolls to the side.
I recall the lessons of first aid. “Patty, wake up, can you hear me?”
I forget for a moment about my own infirmity, and shake her shoulders. Her bulging breasts, half again their previous size, sway. Her eyes roll back in her head, and she lets out a little gasp. But she doesn’t respond. I listen for her breath. It is inaudible, and makes only light tickle of my cheek. I see my purse, and grapple for my phone. My boobs and pits are screaming warnings to me, but I am panicking. My phone doesn’t work. The battery is dead. So is Patty’s.
I lean out the window and cry out in broken Spanish toward the catering truck, “Hola, Necesito un medico. Mi amiga está¡ enferma. Mi amiga está¡ muriendo.” I need a doctor, my friend is sick, my friend is dying. The day laborers gathered at the catering truck look up, hoot sexual innuendoes in my direction, and laugh. I beckon them to come up, but they shake their heads and look away. They probably know better than to trespass in Mara’s house.
I turn to Patty, and try to remember the lessons from the first aid videos we watched in Human Development class at Fairfax. Was it two breaths, followed by ten chest pumps, or the opposite? I tilt back her head, and mash my lips against hers. They are still warm, but dry and unresponsive. I breathe in deeply, my breasts heave agonizingly as I inhale and exhale into her chest. Once, twice, and then I plant my palm in the narrow valley between Patty’s double D boobs and compress her rib cage. My boobs shudder and ripple ten times, my arm pits piston, and my scrotum wobbles, sending lightening strikes of pain all over me. I catch my breath, inhale, seal my lips on hers, and exhale again.
After a dozen cycles, I am bathed in sweat and faint with exertion and pain. Patty’s eyes flutter, and she murmurs “pá¡relo,” stop it, but I continue for five more cycles until her eyes open.
“Gracias,” she whispers. I bring her a bottle of water and an antibiotic. She swallows it, sets the bottle down, and drifts away. Her hand releases the bottle and it tips. I take a mouthful and squirt it into her mouth, but it dribbles down her chin and into the crevice between her hugely inflated breasts.
I watch her breathing for a few minutes. It’s shallow but steady. I am aching and exhausted. I lie down. The Percocet takes the edge off of my pain and my anxiety over Patty’s perilous condition, and I rest my eyes. The banda music fades, the ceiling stains billow and swirl, and the room spins away beneath me.
I feel hands probing my boobs. I push them away, trying to protect them. But other hands force mine away, and pin them to the bed. I open my eyes and peer through groggy, unfocussed eyes on a small group that has gathered over me.
“I am the medico,” The man nearest me speaks through a surgical mask. He has silvery, curly hair and eyebrows. He pulls down my bra. I notice a tremor in his touch.
I try again to push his hands away. “That hurts. Help Patty, the girl on the other bed.” Other hands again arrest mine. I look over. It’s Roberto.
“Patty doesn’t need help from anyone but God.”
I turn my head toward her cot. It’s empty.
“You killed her? And now you propose to care of me?” I am angry at the doctor for his incompetence, angry at Roberto for forcing us to undergo dangerous surgery in primitive conditions, and at myself for abandoning my effort to resuscitate her.
The doctor forces my hands to my sides. “Someone else did her procedure, and injected her with liquid silicone. It’s dangerous, and she had an embolism. You have sealed implants. I implanted them through your arm pits, just like they do on Canon Drive. I was the best cosmetic surgeon in Tijuana. You will do well. These look good.” He replaces my bra, pulls at my panties and peels back the bandages from between my legs.
“You have to change this more often.” He brandishes the bandage, crusted with blood and puss.
“The pills made me sleepy. There was no one to help.”
“Your helper was the one who needed help.” Roberto pointed toward Patty’s vacant cot. “I’ll send someone tomorrow.”
“No showers until tomorrow, and then, cover the site and don’t get it wet. But, it’s healing well enough; I’ll take the stitch out.” He snipped at me and I felt a sting as the suture parted. It oozed blood for a few seconds and he covered it with fresh gauze.
“New bandages every four hours for the rest of today, eight hours tomorrow. And don’t lift your arms over your head, not even to wash your hair, for three more days. No physical activity for a week. He thumped Roberto on the chest.
“That includes sex.”
“Is cock sucking sex?”
The doctor laughs. “Ask the Bill Clinton. Or better yet, ask Hillary.”
The Mara all laugh. Even they get that joke.
“We have to get rid of the other one’s body. Take good care of the TChica. She’s the only one we have left.” Roberto and the Mara leave.
The doctor and I are alone. He locks the door. The doors of the Maras’ Escalade slam, and they roar away. The doctor hovers over me.
“Do you have any feelings in your balls and in your breasts?”
“Yeah, like a coyote is chewing my scrotum. My boobs feel like a couple of hot bowling balls sewed under my skin. But that’s actually an improvement over yesterday.”
“You must sit up in bed at least part of the time.”
I sit up, and gasp as the bowling balls strain against their taut sacks. I flinch, and howl.
“Your pain management will improve over time, but this won’t.” He gestures a slanted line across my chest, and then points to my left boob. “This one shifted. It’s too low.”
My face flushes with anxiety as he holds a mirror for me to observe. My left breast is an inch lower than the right, and canted more to the outside. My efforts to help Patty had not only failed, they had dislodged my breast. I looked like a freak, not a sexy woman.
“Oh, my god. What can I do?”
“For the moment, put your bra back on. We’ll deal with that later, but like yours, my services have a price.”
“I have nothing to offer.”
“Ah, but you are wrong. You can offer me your own services.” He pulls open his belt, unzips and exposes his cock. It’s small and withered, his ball sack has shriveled, and his pubes have gone gray. I look up at him. His eyes are closed, and his face is alight with a greedy smile. I lean forward and sniff his cock.
“I didn’t say smell it. I said suck me, you little T-slut.”
I get off the cot and bend on my knees in front of him. I flick him teasingly with my tongue, kiss his tip, swipe my tongue beneath his foreskin, and gather a cheesy mouthful of smegma. I wipe it from the tip of my tongue and smear it on his flabby butt, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care, for I have taken his still soft member into my mouth and I am massaging it to life, puckering my cheeks, and inviting it into the hollow of my glottis. He springs to life, and begins rocking from to heel, in rhythm with my motions. My rocking makes my tits swing painfully and my groin feels wet and raw from the movement of my torso as I blow him.
“Did you know I fucked you once before?”
I shake my head, and look up at him through watery eyes.
“It was before your surgery. We were alone, and you were asleep, so I fucked your cute little ass. Even unconscious, you were a good little cum bucket.”
I am angry at this admission. I could tell Roberto, but maybe he wouldn’t care. Maybe a surreptitious fuck was part of the surgical fee the Mara negotiated. I know they think of me as a pretty little fuck hole for them to cum in or sell. That’s what a trannie is. We are she male freaks, chicks with dicks. No one really cares about us after they pop inside us. They pay to cum, and pay so we will go when they have finished. If they want more, they pay again, and we gladly take the money as the only acknowledge we will ever receive, or expect to receive, of our beauty and value. That’s why trannies make ideal perfect whores. We only want to be fucked and paid. Being showered with money and semen reaffirms our aspirations to feminine beauty. I suck and get fucked, therefore I am.
I suppress my anger and stay in character. As he hardens, I open my throat to him, and when he pulls back, I pucker my lips around his cock’s corona and lure him back inside me.
He is grunting and moaning, “My slut goddess, my angel whore, you little slab of Asian street meat, ay, yay, aiii.”
He pulls back, jerks himself, and a stringy strand of semen gushes forth. I close my eyes as it hits my cheek, my eye lids, and my nose, and then he rubs the glans on my cheek.
“Squeeze my cajones.”
I grip one of his balls in each hand and compress them. My chest is showered with the ropey remnants of his load.
He grimaces. “That was very good. Now wipe yourself off, you little cum slut.” I rise, emotionally and physically exhausted and wracked with pain. As I stagger to the toilet he playfully smacks my butt.
“Next time I’ll take some more of that.”
I wash my face with cold water squeeze Purel onto the remnants of the soggy toilet paper. The cum is dripping into the seam where the tight sports bra meets my stretched breast skin. I wipe under the fabric, and wish desperately that I could use the grimy shower. But to do so would risk a devastating infection.
I smile ingratiatingly at the medico, who has pulled up his pants and is waiting by my bed. “That was yummy. You have a big load for a, um.., for a doctor.”
“That’s barely half of the load I shot up your ass, my little T-whore.”
“Don’t doctors worry about safe sex? It’s not like you are the only one whose been there, you know.”
“The taker takes most of the risk, in my opinion. In any case, I take PCR/DNA tests regularly. I will take a blood sample for you, as I now wish also to test you.”
He jabs my forearm expertly and draws a sample of my blood. He takes out another syringe, fills it with a fluid from a vial.
“You are going to need this. What I have to do next is going to hurt a little.”
He pricks the needle in my arm and injects me. The rush is instantaneous. The filthy room takes on a warm glow, the sleazy medico seem like an old friend, and the battling regions of pain, anxiety and anger that have afflicted me melt into warm, liquid Nirvana.
“I feel wonderful. What did you give me?”
“Ah, so you have never had heroin before. Like you, the drug is a dangerous but attractive mistress.”
“Now I know what my mom’s drug habit is all about. I’ve never felt better.” He places both hands beneath my left boob and presses down with all of his weight. I feel like my chest is collapsing, and my breath escapes in a anguished shriek. But instead of reverberating and returning, and inducing panic or shock, the pain and anxiety quickly recede.
“Is that it?”
“No, I want to bind you more tightly.” He wraps my boobs in a tight elastic bandage.
“Don’t take this off for two days. And afterwards, wear the bra for a week. After that, you should be perfect.
“Will you come back and give me more medicine?”
“I would love to make you my junkie sex slave, but I think Roberto would object. My job is done here.”
“That wasn’t so bad. Thank you.”
He leans over and kisses me, and I kiss him back.
“What’s your name, doctor”
“Call me Rodrigo.” He bows. Until we meet again.”
I had been in agony for an instant, but the drug annihilated my suffering. But as my junkie mother’s chaotic life has proved, you can’t remove pain from life with a drug. You can only defer the reckoning.
I am alone again. The door is locked. I am still a prisoner in harsh solitary confinement. I look in the refrigerator at the six pack of out dated yoghurt, the moldy bread, the grease spotted bag of leftovers from El Pollo Loco. I want to get the taste of cum from my mouth. I eat a few spoonfuls of strawberry yoghurt.
I am the Mara’s captive trans hooker now, but they have given me the means to become free.
The great thing about drugs is that for moment you can see beyond your immediate, shitty circumstances. The heroine is easing the pain and anxiety of the present and lets me look into my future, when the doors are open and the Mara are gone. I imagine myself as I will be when my bandages come off. I will be a young, pretty, slender Asian with 36 D breasts. Surely I can find all of the work I can take at $300 per session. There are about 10 million guys in driving distance. If one out of one hundred of them likes Asian bottom trannies, I’ve got clients to last a lifetime. The Mara will put me back on the street, but a street needn’t be just a stroll. It can be an escape.
I almost escaped the Mara with Antoine. I can find someone else who will help me, now that I have become more beautiful. I will bleach platinum streaks and dye a few strands strawberry. I will get new hoop earrings that will dangle to my neck. I will make all of the other trannies jealous, and will be able to get the best dates with the richest guys.
I will get a Macbook with broadband wireless, so I can have an ad on Eros, my own website with sexy pictures of me for sale, I will make dates with my I-phone, and receive them at an apartment so close to Peanuts that the guys will be able to walk there with me. And when we have finished I can walk back and find another, and another, until my purse is stuffed with money and my mouth and ass are so stuffed with cock that they are exhausted. I will have a bank account, mutual funds, health insurance, a Camry, a king size bed with mirror beside it on the wall.
Now the heroine subsides and pain begins to throb.
The tissue surrounding the implant that Dr. Rodrigo shifted is on fire. I want more drugs, but one of the Mara has stolen the rest of the Percocet. There is nothing I can do to make it go away. I suppress my sobs because it hurts too much to cry. I can never cry again.
Fear returns. Who will come through the door next? Will I hook up with a crazy who hates trannies, or hates himself for wanting trannies, who will kill me? Will I get infected with HIV? If I ever even get a sex change operation, will anyone decent want a fake girl like I will be? How will I survive when I can’t hook anymore because I’m not young and hot? Will I ever get a real job, a real home, a real boyfriend? Will I ever have a real family instead of a couple of junkie criminals who disappear most of the time?
My life is too precarious for me to allow myself these emotions. I am so weak and vulnerable, so alone and lonely, that I can show no fear or hesitation. Patty could have been my friend, but she has left me. I try to imagine what life could be like if I had a real friend. It’s impossible to be friends with GGs or guys. And the lives of other T-Girls are just as dangerous as my own.
Now, I am alone with Patty’s ghost. I cry over her passing, my failure to save her, and our lost future. She tells me it’s OK, that she got in life to become what she most wanted, and left life happy. She thanks me for resuscitating her and forgives me for not keeping watch over her instead of sleeping. She promises that she will keep watch over me forever, that she will be my angel and guide me to freedom in this lifetime and into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now, I know she is on a path of rebirth into this world of the Mara, the world of cruel, violent men. She was too attached to that world, and to me, to leave it behind and follow the light. I cry, because I know that I am like her. I too am enamored of my feminine beauty and sensuality to escape rebirth. When it is my time, I will not be able to follow the light. I will endure another cycle of rebirth, perhaps one even more trouble filled than this one.

TBC

If you liked this story, please post a comment or email me at [email protected]

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Comments

Goyescas

laika's picture

My friend Anais and I were looking at a book of paintings by Francisco Goya.
Her niece wandered by and looked. Said rather distainfully, "He really had a morbid imagination!"
I said, "Imagination nothing! The man was a witness both the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution.
This is what he saw when he looked out his front door!"

The Tyla Flowers (and Alexandra Rios) sagas are like this. Intense distillations---rendered in amazing virtuoso
prose---of the absolute worst that a transsexual street prostitute could go through; horrific, unrelenting, and as we approach the Transgender Day of Rememberance- neccessary. While I can't blame anyone who can't bear to read these (I barely can myself), they're not exercises in morbidity for its own sake, but reminders of a forgotten segment of the t.g. community. Let's hope our young heroine escapes the clutches of the MS-13 gang, doesn't wind up with AIDS or strung out on dope, but escapes this life. Maybe with the help of one of these charities (hint! hint!) that help kids like Tyla find their way off the street...
~~~Laika

Cut and Pump

Two simple words of Anglo-Saxon stem. Brrr...

Embolisms are such a crappy way to die. Makes me think of drowning...

This is a chilling but inevitable chapter in the story of Tyla. Will she escape? How many more bodies must she climb over before she reaches safety—at least, safety for the moment?

This series is a T-girl version of "The Lower Depths," with notes as creepy as parts of "La-Bas."

Tyla Flowers is writing a classic. Pleasant dreams!

rg

so close ...

I may have been at a time.

Part of me had wanted a live similar to Tyla's. Wanted to be a sexy big boobed girl. Be wanted.
When I was in southern Calli in the summer of 2004 I may have been close to that than I realized.

Reading this story makes me so sad for Tyla and shows me how lucky I was to not have gotten my dream.
Sure I may have advanced in to girl hood a lot faster but I would have been destroyed even faster.

Tyla is at least used to growing up in such a harsh enviorment. I or others who look for help in that place would not have lasted long in her live.

It hurts to read her story but I can't stop.
You write so cruely detailed and realistic the story just draws me in. Please keep going.

I hope Tyla will make it out of there and find true happyness any peace but I fear she wont.

Thanks for another hartbreaking good chapter Tyla.

hugs

Holly

Friendship is like glass,
once broken it can be mented,
but there will always be a crack.

T_T

I can't help but cry, this is so sad, she's only 16, she shouldn't have to go through this. DAMN MARA! I HOPE THEY ALL DIE!!!!!!!!! No, they deserve worse than death, I know exactly what I'd want to do to them, each and individually ><

--------------------------------------------
I just got to be me :D

I know who I am, I am me, and I like me ^^
Transgender, Gamer, Little, Princess, Therian and proud :D

the truth about Secondary Education

Secondary Education is fiction, as disclosed in my comment to chapter 3. the reality it depicts is all too real and present in Los Angeles and many other urban cities around the world. Shortly after I began serializing Secondary Education, a very talented female, lesbian writer named Cris Beam wrote a memoir of her experiences teaching, mentoring and ultimately parenting TG teens in Los Angeles in the early 2000's. It is a fascinating read which has influenced and guided my own writing since I discovered it. You can buy it on Amazon following the link below.

xoxox, TF

Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers

Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers by Cris Beam (Hardcover - Jan 2, 2007)
Buy new: $25.00 $16.50 55 Used & new from $7.17
Get it by Friday, Nov 16 if you order in the next 4 hours and choose one-day shipping.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.
4.7 out of 5 stars (10)
Other Editions: Paperback
Excerpt - page 7: "... SCHOOL i "Yes," I said. "My name is Cris Beam. I'm a writer who just moved into town, and I'm ..."
Surprise me! See a random page in this book.

http://amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/103-0708600-1251010?url=sea...

Tyla Flowers

This is a chilling story ...

... and somehow compelling even though it isn't my usual fare. For the same reason I found Alexandra Rios' story equally fascinating. Perhaps one reason is the writing. Even though I skim some of the more graphic details the style fits the atmosphere perfectly. I have no idea whether this depiction of low-life has any validity - I am nether American nor from the sort of background described, but it rings true - either it is, or the writer has a vivid imagination (as writer should have, I suppose)

I have reservations about the layout. If you aren't going to separate paragraphs with a blank line, then it makes reading easier if the new paragraph is indented about 4 spaces. Look at a published book; that's how they are usually printed. Nothing is more intimidating than a solid block of text - good layout attracts readers.

Geoff

alexandra and tyla

hats off to you as a most discerning reader. I am the writer of both The Greatest Lie and Secondary Education.

Tyla Flowers