I sold my life.

She stands up from among the bodies piled around her. Notices the air as it flows through her scalp. She does not smell the decomposed corpses because she has attained a nature of retrieving their coins which cannot transfer into the afterlife.

She places a hand over her face and squints at the setting sun. There is no silence for the bodies who have reached untimely death. Her father’s voice echoes in her brain.

“Follow the corpses, Lara. They would always lead you to your daily bread.” Then he would pause and say.

“Everybody dies at their assigned time.” At the same time, tearing open their shirts to find jewelry.

They fought two weeks ago, Lara and her father.

She had pulled his wrists as he tried to walk out of their tiny shack. She had shouted her lungs at his face.

“There are other ways to get food, papa. We don’t need to sacrifice our humanity for it.”

“What do you know about sacrifice?” He yelled and pushed her to the floor.

“Are you happy or fulfilled?” She raised her head, tears filling her eyes.

He gentled his steps and stopped, his back still facing her.

“What else can we do, Lara? We can survive without happiness. I am happy when the food sits on our table. You find happiness where you make it.”

“I cannot keep doing this anymore.” She whispered, loud enough for him to hear.

“Then suit yourself.” He said. “Suit yourself and die of hunger.”

He banged the shack door, and she bent her head to cry in her palms.

She cried herself to sleep that night, but her father never returned.

She thought she despised him, and it pained her to feel that way. She thought he had left her and betrayed she cried to no avail.

The truth was that however heavy her heart felt before she stepped out to search the bodies, she always returned home with an even heavier heart. The bodies seemed to judge her, seemed to glare at her as she poked her palms into their clothes. This was what her father never understood.

Her stomach growled after she had cried enough, and she stepped out of the shack to search the bodies for her daily bread, not knowing anything other than this act. She was rummaging through one pocket in the dead of the night when she saw it had her papa’s face.

She looked at him, kneeling, unable to drill out tears from her heart at the moment. She was caught in a spell, unable to kiss his head or say a word, and only decided to cover his eyes.

It had a look of horror on it, mouth open and in shock, like it finally came to understand what life and death meant.

She bent her neck towards the sky and tried to blink back the tears that threatened to fall out. She could picture why he ended up dead, and she dragged her feet home and went to sleep.

But Lara did not do this without searching his pockets for paper.

Presently, there is a shiver down her spine, a long, tingling tremble. Her mind tells her to run, but her body asks her to where? And she stays stooped, still searching the corpses.

In that same breath, the hitmen who dump the bodies into the river come towards her back.

“Ah, another beggar, this one a child. Let us kill and dump her like we did the other man.”