I chose the room with the fireplace because when I arrived, it was already cold, and it was mid-day. The sun was high, but the mountain felt higher, larger, the cold of it powerful enough to make that light irrelevant.

“The fireplace is non-functional, A-T-M,” Tall Wife said. She was still counting my money. She did it slow, and got distracted often. Her Short Wife beside her was clearly becoming annoyed by this, and when I turned to look Tall Wife blinked slow as a newborn and froze her hands, looking at me with an odd surprise.

Short Wife snatched the money out her hands and counted it quicker. “You’re six bucks short,” she snapped out.

“Yeah,” I said, honestly kind of offended she had noticed. Wouldn’t it have been more polite, more considerate of my plight to pretend? “I’ll get more when I go into town tomorrow.”

“Whoa. So sure!” Tall wife laughed. Her laugh was kind; loud and bewildered in this world. “What do you do?”

Ginny had finished with her surveyal of the little room. She came up to the wives then and looked up, tail wagging with caution until Tall Wife bowed down and scritched her head. Then she was in love, as she always was after even a morsel of affection.

“Beg,” I said. “I beg.”

“That won’t work, here,” Short Wife said. “Folks will try and give you more, and all the more is stuff that ain’t money.”

“Charity is a big problem, in Asheville,” Tall Wife added. “Isn’t it, lil baby! Lil sir!” Ginny licked her face like it had peanut butter on it, and she giggled.

“She’s a girl,” I said, “What do you mean? I thought it was all progressive and shit, as North Carolina goes. I get good money from liberals.”

“In Philadelphia, maybe,” Short Wife said. “Here? Folks are too kind to give you money. They wanna give you all but. You need to give them something back if you actually want the cash.”

“Ok,” I said. I looked down at Ginny. “Kissing booth, then.”

This broke the tension. Tall Wife cackled, and even Short Wife laughed, rolling her eyes. “Careful with using the dog, too,” she said lightly after. “I could totally see ‘calling animal control’ being justified as another nice, liberal act of kindness.”

“Why would they do that?” I snapped. “She’s well cared for.”

She was. Ginny was my pride and joy, my love, the reflection I wanted. I even joked about that–she was a little white pitbull, gleeful and intent on rolling in every spill. “She’s dirty and white, like me,” I liked to say, and every kind of person laughed at that. Then I’d wash her, and hold her after wrapped in a towel, and she’d shiver in my arms and lick my face.

“You ain’t, though,” Tall Wife said, and laughed. Short Wife did too, and they left that way, both snickering, Ginny trying to trail after them.

I caught Ginny’s collar and fumed for the rest of the day, pointedly not counting the holes in my clothes, not addressing the tangled mass of hair, and certainly not showering.

It was too cold for that.

The next day I made a sign. I didn’t have poster-board, so I taped together blank pieces of my journal with duct tape, trying to keep the crooked silver lines of it on the back. I carefully traced the bubble letters with my pen, and then painted them in. The paint and the tape I found in the kitchen; used quick without asking and intended to put it back, but it’d be in my bag when I got back to my dad’s less than a month later.

They were right about Asheville. So was the internet–it was a college town thick with rich liberal kids with rich liberal mamas and motives that made them love the idea of offering me things like granola bars, soap, organic whole wheat noodles and expensive juices. They presented these with glee, and when I asked for money, they offered to drive me to a place that might help. One even offered to take me in, let me sleep in her spare bedroom. She was younger than me, for sure, maybe early twenties, and had something like a spare bedroom, and I wanted to kill her and feed her to Ginny.

Ginny wouldn’t have eaten her, though. Ginny lulled her head on the girl’s lap when she crouched down, utterly thrilled with this influx of attention and love. “I’m not homeless,” I snapped. “I have a place. It’s great. An old manor in the woods on the mountain.”

The girl blinked, and her eyes got sad. “Black Mountain?”

The way she said it told me she knew something I didn’t, or wouldn’t know. I held my chin high and glared. “Yeah.”

“There’s a lot of drug use up there,” she said conversationally.

“What the fuck does that mean,” I snapped back, “this whole fucking ‘city’ stinks of weed. Including you. And not the good kind, neither. Skunk weed.”

She walked away pretty quick after that.

By the time I got back, I had a haul worthy of a Trader Joe’s grocery shop for a family of five, and not a dime more. I dumped it all on the table in the living room and the wives and the other residents were thrilled, leaping forward and ripping open bags of Pirate’s Booty, breaking open mangos so soft they fell apart in your hands.

“You get any money, though?” Short Wife asked, raising her eyebrows at me.

“Shut up,” I snapped.

Tall Wife laughed. Short Wife was less amused. “I told you,” she said, “you gotta give them something.”

“I sell poems,” a twiggy, strung-out man who lived in the room above mine said, “I have a type-writer, though. You probably couldn’t get away with it with paper.”

“I have a chromebook,” I said quick, “Plus, I’m a pretty good writer.”

He shook his head. “Chromebook won’t work. You gotta hand the poems over, after. And with a chromebook… well, how can I say this… you’re too much like them, but shitty. An off-brand version of them. A typewriter makes me an event, you know? Not a person. A person they’ll wanna help. An event, though? That they’ll just wanna experience. And they’ll pay for that.”

This was, by far, the most helpful advice I had received. I pondered it that night in bed over the final crumbs of the weed I’d bought before moving up here.

The next day, I put on hoop earrings and a long, tattered skirt. I braided my hair best I could, and I yanked my blanket off the mattress on the floor.

I didn’t bother with a sign, this time. Just brought my largest, chunkiest tarot deck.

That night I returned with $137. I handed over a ten and said, “Keep the change.” Bought weed and wine with the rest, immediately. Why not? I knew how to get food better than I could afford, now.

I shared it all until the stash got low enough it made me anxious. Then, I pulled it back into my room, my room with the fireplace that didn’t work. Getting drunk made me feel like it was warm even though it wasn’t, even though the cold was the kind that seeped deep into your bones and stayed there, even though Ginny kept moving closer and closer, until she was just shifting up on me and shivering.

I wrapped her and my lap both in the dirty blanket. Packed another bowl, poured another mug full of wine, and looked up out my big, cracked window.

The stars were so bright, here. The sky so thick with them it was hard to look at, hard to see at all.