Shirelle
When Shirelle was a little girl she liked to look at maps. She spent hours contemplating the various shapes and sizes of states and small countries and the straight and winding blue and red lines that connect cities to one another inside the covers of a road atlas her mother bought for her at Dollar General. One would think by this early fascination, Shirelle might one day end up a cartographer or navigator or perhaps at least a travel agent or truck driver.
Shirelle didn’t end up doing anything, in fact. By the time she reached womanhood she had long since dropped out of school, her drug addiction had left her depleted of any ray of hope that young children instinctively possess and the string of pregnancies (two abortions, one miscarriage, one stillborn), random beatings and other acts of violence inflicted upon her left her body and spirit worn out and beleaguered.
You hear stories of how some people find the resolve to escape their fates in life, to overcome life’s obstacles and succeed against seemingly impossible odds. This is not one of them. Like her mother before her, Shirelle fell victim to the horrors that sometimes entangle the poor, disempowered, disenfranchised, downtrodden residents of US inner-city slums.
Shirelle also liked to play with coins. Her grandfather, old and dilapidated already by Shirelle’s first memory of him, would often come to stay with her for long periods of time. Her grandfather had an impressive collection of old and foreign coins and one shiny silver dollar for every year of his life. He started collecting coins when he was in the Navy in World War II and kept them in a White Owl cigar box. Come January every year he would take the city bus to Wells Fargo and swap out a paper dollar for a newly minted silver one. He instructed Shirelle, his only grandchild, that she would someday own the coins if she promised to continue the tradition and then hand down the collection to one of her grandchildren. Shirelle spent hours at a time cleaning and polishing the coins, fantasizing about the day they would all be hers; her favorites were the ones from faraway lands. Shirelle’s grandfather died on his birthday and she used the coins to buy crack on the street corner that same afternoon.
As a young woman, Shirelle moved out of her mother’s apartment and into one in the same housing project. She and her mother had some sort of falling out and they rarely talked. Shirelle was always getting evicted for one reason or another and when she exhausted all other resources she ended up spending most of her days walking around town and most nights sleeping on park benches.
Occasionally she stayed at the various shelters but for the most part didn’t like their rules and chose the streets instead. One bitterly cold January day as she walked about town she glanced up and became startled and saddened by the reflection she saw of herself in a storefront window on Tryon Street. She looked terrible: thin as a rail, her clothes and hair tattered and in disarray, her two front teeth missing from an incident with a violent john who didn’t like the way she gave head, both arms pocked with needle marks and swollen with infection.
She pondered how things had gotten to this point, this out of hand. Then a gentleman in a fine navy pinstriped suit came out of the downtown library and noticed Shirelle sitting on the sidewalk with tears streaming down her face. With great disgust, he mumbled something to her while avoiding eye contact and emptied his pockets into the paper cup she held out, in which she noticed a shiny new silver dollar. She picked up the coin and held it between her thumb and forefinger, fondling the edges and admiring the way the silver sparkled when the sun’s rays caught it just right. She noted the date and thought to herself that it was brand new.
Perhaps Shirelle saw the coin symbolic of an opportunity to fulfill the promise she made to her grandfather years before, to start anew; perhaps it somehow, in some strange way, proved to be the impetus she needed to kick the drug habit and get her life together. Maybe she saved some money and bought a new road map and took a grey hound bus to a faraway place where she could start a new life. Or, perhaps she used the dollar coin as down payment on her next binge. Who knows? No one has seen her since that day.
