In her Burberry tote you will find tobacco deposits relinquished from a lighter. Dull scissors are kept in its womb to trim her withered ends in the yellow light. An empty wine bottle corked with ashes keeps the tote’s belly plump. A canteen emerges from its seams. You will find her Burberry tote behind the door of Gentleman Native.

The girl sat cross-legged on the earth floor. Her hair fell over brimful breasts. Bare foot soles were painted by the soil. Her dirt-rimmed fingernails dove into the tote’s mouth, withdrawing cigarette and lighter. Smoke circled the girl’s nostrils. Her eyes hibernated into her skull. She dreamt of a governor’s mansion, the year 1760, and red brick.
Gentleman Native snarled as his disdained door exposed locks for teeth-he would not have her go. She awoke, drowning the flames with scotch.
Lady Refugee returned the organs to her Burberry tote as she spoke, “I shall be Lady Refugee, if you be Gentleman Native.”

Lady Refugee fled from a brick mansion. In it lived a man whose lips were stained red from wine; a man who was tied to her because of a bid her soulfully righteous parents proposed. He was a governor. He was a governor with the power to lock a man behind bars; a governor with the money to buy seamstresses for his wife. She would need dresses to hide her bruises. She married a man in power.

But that was then- a time without Gentleman Native.

And this is how it came to be:

He stood in primitive atrophy. If you be Lady Refugee, hummed the disdained door, I shall be Gentleman Native. Arched bone beckoned a succumbed soul to a Widower - a barn whose tip-toes embed in the corrupt earth; a silo to fund its wreckage. The Widower peered through soot-stained panes, like those of the feathered carnivore in the night. Thistles and weeds pulled at Lady Refugee’s ankles, drawing acute lacerations on fair skin. She danced under a moon engulfed in demoralized flames, kindled by the ashes of an abuser. “Welcome home, love.”