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When Clay first set eyes on Kinga Voytek, he knew in his gut that something was wrong.
It was a hot day and a dry one at that. The kind of heat that sucks even the moisture from your throat, leaving your nose feeling like you've just gotten over a particularly bad cold. Every inhale is razor blades and produces a thin whistle.
Clay had only made things worse for himself, insisting on the usual cigarette out the back of the brick building where he perched on the edge of a weather tyre, gone soft from months in the sun.
There was no shade at the back of Signy's Solutions, only the necks of beer bottles gone smooth from the rain, flattened cans, yellowed plastic. The concrete below him, which the sun bounced from mercilessly, had seen better. Not five feet away, a used condom imprinted itself between the cracks, an attempt to repair the irreparable.
In front of him, a low rusty chain link fence obscured his vision of what lay beyond. The train tracks weren't the kind that carried any passengers, only freight thundered past when the whistle sounded its discordant cry. Past the tracks was dry grass, shorn by God knows who, and even further still were the squat silhouettes of houses, their tin roofs a silver glare.
Backyards spilled onto the grass, maybe that was where the upkeep came from, though Clay had been coming to this same spot for years now and he was yet to ever spot anyone with a lawn mower. No, what was a far more familiar sight were the rogue games of football between the neighbourhood kids, free from the shackles of rules and sportsmanship, their war cries the kind that could rival the Spartans.
Some days they opted for golf played with hockey sticks, seeing which one could get the ball between the sleepers, decrying when it inevitably shot through the fence and bounced off the brick wall of Signy's.
Clay always threw it back with a wave, but the children never returned it.
Instead they would glower, their faces already wary and weathered, because the children around here knew better than to bow to the kindness of strangers. Clay couldn't hold it against them, he had been them once, and perhaps still was them, older and not much wiser. He could still see the echo of their contemptuous youth in his features when he looked in the mirror, the lack of yield that was only born through learning the cruelty of life before possessing the means of retaliation.
