Shemale

I had nothing else, not even slippers. The strange man who took me out there, told me to count slowly to ten, and then remove the blindfold. Then I was to leave and keep going until I reached the border towns that was my husband’s last demand of me, and it wasn’t in me to deny him now when I had obeyed him from the moment we met.

So I did as I had been bid, and found out that this was what happened to divorced sima. I knew they were discarded, but I’d never known the details. The border towns were where we all ended up.

After only a week in the town of Memele, trying to find work and failing repeatedly, I gave in to the inevitable and became a prostitute. It was what most ex-sima became, because like my pimp says, sex was the only thing most sima knew how to do better than normal citizens. And whores were in great demand at the borders more than anywhere else, the rough conditions not an environment that tempted any but the miners, the soldiers on campaigns beyond and mercenaries from everywhere. And that, my pimp says, is the reason why ex-sima are sent to the border to tend to the Killians far away from the comforts of home, to keep up morale.

It makes sense.

I was 30, the age where I should have been firmly established in the Troika, leading the Jann community. Instead, I was barely eking out a living as a whore in a strange country I had never really seen until I had to make my way to the border. After almost fifteen years of living in isolation, having limited contact with the few my husband allowed, I was completely unprepared for facing the outside world again.

“Ready? Hesak asked, looking me up and down.

I nodded, tugging at my skirt. It was short and clingy, and rose up at the slightest movement, but clients liked it and hopefully this one Hesak was taking me to would also like it. It would mean three months as a live-in, and that was three months of security, being fed and housed and ten gold coins at the end. And, possibly best of all, only having one man for three whole months if he didn’t share me with others. He was a recluse, so I was hoping that wouldn’t happen.