She and her mama had fled South on the promise of a white man. They had fled South thinking that they were going to make it. Back home, that’s how you made it. You latched onto the arm of a white man and you were set. You had made BINGO! You were off welfare. You had three meals a day on your table. You were never cold, and the only trade-off was becoming their little sex slave. That was the easy part. At first.

She and her mama had left their home for “better days ahead.” Something that her mama always said to her. “Bunny, there’ll always be better tomorrows. Remember that.”

In the cold of this night, looking down at the iced-up North Saskatchewan River, all she could see was the awfulness of all her yesterdays after they had come here in hope of all their better tomorrows. Her mama a woman in love and she a teenage girl wanting to finish high school. Finish high school and go to the big school. The one that was never in the North. The one called university.

But their lives became a tangled web of booze and dope and sleeping on sidewalks together. Spooning like two young kids. Twins wrapped together in an amniotic sac of concrete. One who looked like a slightly older version of the other. They had learned to eat from dumpsters. They had learned to shit on sidewalks. They had learned to give their bodies away to any man who had a bit of money.

They worked the streets together. Sometimes billing themselves out as a Husky Mom and Daughter Tag Team. When they were first new to the city, they became a sensation. They made 95th Street their bedroom. So many guys coming into town from their swing up North in one of the oil camps wanted a reminder of the life they had there. They were the best customers. Loose with their money. Loose with their booze. Loose with their fists.

She and her mama had sported so many black eyes. So many cracked ribs and so much rig pig sperm in their stomachs. Some days that was the only nourishment they had.

When the times were good and the money was flowing from the oilfields into their pockets, they would stay at a hotel that overlooked the river. They’d gaze out the shiny windows and tell each other that this was the life. The life that they were meant to live. This was the city where they would succeed. They would go out for mani-pedis. Get their hair done up good and buy sexy, too-small black dresses. On those stretches the clientele changed to old white men looking for an Eskimo dog sled ride. And they gave it to them.

Hunched on their knees, propped up on their elbows and making sure the sounds of traditional throat whispers came out of their mouths. Singing yelping whispers out into the rooms that were overpriced and overrated, with men in tweed suits shoving themselves into them from behind, doing all the things they would and could never do to their trophy wives.