Despite the mandatory showers, the mission smelled rancid. It smelled rancid because people’s clothes were rancid. The women were prohibited from washing them in the sinks. When they had used their ration of soap for bathing, they were handed a towel, which they were made to deposit in a large bin before putting their polluted clothes back on. It was just as well. The industrial soap at the mission smelled like tallow. It made Aria sick to her stomach.

As usual, Aria said next to nothing during her time at the mission. Some of the other women, who, like Aria, stayed for successive nights, began to wonder if she could speak at all. In her silence, Aria simply observed. She listened to conversations to extract advice that the other women were unaware they were even giving. Advice about where to get food and water, places where the police didn’t hassle you during the day, places to go undetected at night, places that gave away things like clothes and toiletries for free, places to get temporary labor jobs for the day, places to loiter and, perhaps most importantly, places to procure street drugs. It took Aria a few minutes of confusion to figure out what they were really talking about, seeing as how none of the women overtly used the word drugs, nor did they use any of the names she had heard commonly used for them. Instead, they spoke of things like Smoke, Bo-Bo, C-Game, Chicken Feed, Base, Brown Sugar, Dirt and Seccy.

If she wanted to stay at the mission, she had to be there by 5pm. Each person trying to get a bed for the night had to fill out the required paperwork about who they were and where they were going. Each night Aria lied on nearly every question. She felt the tension of the potential of getting caught in that lie, but she soon came to find that no one really cared. The actual mission of the mission was to proselytize.

After check-in, it was mandatory for the women and children to listen to a preacher for at least an hour. The first time Aria was subjected to this routine, she was struck by the sheer effort put into the man’s seemingly effortlessly dressed-down attire. As with a politician, it struck her as contrived. His dress was chosen to evoke a sense of commonality with the vagrants who stood before him every night. She could feel the self-gratification oozing through his philanthropy. As a result, the words, which made a pretense of the words of Christ, were contaminated. They were contaminated by the overwhelming feeling that, as if life had not been cruel enough to these people already, they were now all being used as pawns to guarantee someone else’s admittance into heaven. It reminded her of Mrs Johnson’s faith … A mediocre veil drawn over the reality of things to make them look better than they truly were.