This story has been on my mind for months (as usual), and I finally managed to spit it out. At the last minute, I decided to connect it with one of my multi-chapter stories. Enjoy. ~Sage

Runaway

Whenever the bad dreams came, Mãe always hummed my favorite lullaby, warm and low in her throat.

With the remaining tendrils of nightmares still clinging to the edges of my imagination, I would lie there trembling and at the mercy of my mind. All Mãe had to do was hum that tune and all was all right. Whenever something bad happened, whenever I was scared, Mama always hummed. There was magic in her song, peace in the notes of each chord, like the smooth trail of her fingertips down the side of my face.

She was humming that lazy lullaby on that ripe and sweltering afternoon when the bullet exploded through her cheek.

Mãe was on the sink. Mãe was on the floor. Mãe was on my dress and on my hands.

The air smothered my lungs, filled my throat and mouth with a heady mixture of the smell of Mama's blood and the fresh mangoes she'd been peeling. The world spun; I couldn't breathe. Outside the bullets kept coming, pelting the houses around us with a fierce and insistent thwip thwip thwip, screams and war cries filling the sky. An earthquake shook the ground beneath my feet, a low growl stirring from the black depths of the earth, erupting through the white stones—or perhaps that was a growl from the black depths of the human heart, and the shaking ground merely the quake of my life collapsing around me.

As the blood pooled around Mãe's shattered form, I could still hear her humming. The lullaby lingered, floated into the heat and suffocated. It had lost its healing powers.

I was seven. It was my birthday. This time the nightmare didn't go away.

Father started crying and cursing Mama's murderers, his skin and shirt crimson with her blood. A second bullet struck Pai in the chest, and another through his throat, silencing his futile shrieks of grief and fury. Pai slumped to the kitchen floor alongside my mother—pai, my strong father, broken as a felled palm tree.

Another gang shootout. Another innocent life taken. Another normal day in the favela that I called home.

There was no time for tears. I did the only thing I could do. I ran.

It's been thirteen years since my parents were murdered. I don't remember any birthdays before that one. I just know that my world has never been the same.

For a year I wandered the narrow alleyways and the blackened, trash-littered mud roads, scrambling for food and shelter. Though orphaned, I wasn't a dumb kid. These streets were my playgrounds and these stones my best friends. I knew who to avoid, how to talk and act and walk, how to run, how to hide, and, most importantly, how to fight. Fight flowed in my veins just as strongly as blood.

I was a small girl child so people paid me no mind. Had I been older, I might have been recruited into prostitution. Or maybe I was just so small and so well hidden that the pimps never found me.

As of now, I live with my avô and one of his Capoeira students, Eddy Gordo. Avô lived in São Paolo, but moved to this favela in Rio when he heard of my parents' death. It took him awhile to find me, but when he did, he threw me into the river, scrubbed my dirty flesh raw, rubbed my skin through with avocado oil, and returned to me my pride and strength through Capoeira.

I don't think my parents' death really registered in my head until years later. A short-term memory saves you here. Linger too long on pain, on tragedy and bitterness, and you've already lost. You must learn to have a face of stone, but that doesn't have to apply to your heart. That pain, those memories…they will always be there, but you must reserve it for another time. You can always return to your grief and your anger when everything else has been taken from you. It might even keep you alive. I know it worked wonders for me.

Rio de Janeiro is a beautiful, scarred city, pockmarked and raped several times over by whoever feels like using her. It is my city, a violent, lovely, marred, perfect city. It's ashen walls, slicked with blood and lies and jagged graffiti hold the memories of my childhood. Its streets, lined with sweat and fear and shadow, have seen and known more than you can imagine. I sleep to the lullaby of gunshots and fucking, to the moans of the weak and to the triumphant laughter of the cunning. I wake and walk to indigo nights of shattered innocence and sardonic humor, to green bliss and diamond rings, to the incandescent, drug-induced visions and to the screams of broken hope and stolen dreams.

Poverty sleeps in every shadow, in every corner and in every grimy window. Pain is my best friend, pleasure my lover, life my game.

In Rio you're not allowed any breaks. Reality always returns to kick you in the ass should you stray—should you aspire and try to run away. As a child you learned quickly that there's no such thing as innocence. But it kept you alive and around here that's the most important thing.

The mere act of being alive is a rebellion.

Who in the hell would want to keep on living in a place like this, you wonder. I wonder that every day. It's so easy to die around here. It's so easy to fall into despair. It's so ugly. But it's that fragility that makes it beautiful, just like everything else you can't have. It's also the only world that we favelados know. So we cariocas make do with what we are given—which is nothing.

How do you create something out of nothing?

You name it I've done it. Stolen, hustled, dealt drugs, gotten high, gotten wasted, fucked for money, fucked for the fuck of it, fought and won, fought and lost—lived.

I'm not a bad person. I just know what I need to do to survive and sometimes that requires bad things. It requires multiple personalities. In the slums of Rio de Janeiro, if you don't learn fast you die. Outsiders don't realize that the rules here are different. People come here all the time and try to clean up the place, try to save us poor favela kids and stop the gangs and the drug trafficking. They think they know us better than we know ourselves.

This place isn't in your travel brochure. That Rio with the white powder sand and sunsets like melted gold, that 'hood with glittering hotels and beautiful Brazilian bodies waxed with pineapple oil, exists. The annual flood of tourists and the wealthy getting wealthier is proof of that. But it's also a lie, an intricate masquerade. The sequins and ribbons and feathers and velvet brochures don't reveal the pockmarked and burned face behind the mask.

I'm thankful for my life, for making it this far in one of the most dangerous places in Brazil. But I know I deserve better.

As far as I know, I am the best female Capoeirista in Rio. Fighting helps me survive; people respect—even fear—me. Without Capoeira, I'd probably be in the sex industry or in a gang fighting over scraps and making money off of people's weakness.

But, most importantly, Capoeira keeps me good.

We take refuge in Gustavo's bedroom. A faded Picasso poster adorns the cracked and mold-stained walls, along with the yellowed pages of newspaper clippings, and the lewd mosaics of naked women torn from stolen porn magazines. Bob Marley albums and American music is scattered about the room. The tattered, floral-patterned couch we recline upon has seen many years and has cradled many vagabonds; the curtains, riddled with moth holes and bullet holes alike, fail to mute the sunlight; and the carpet has stains, but it's a cozy little hideaway for crazy rogues like us.

All six of us sit there and laugh and tell our war stories, getting high as shit during the process, because we're all just "a bunch of street cockroaches who have nothing better to do." At least, that's what Eddy says. These "street cockroaches" just happen to be my friends. Eddy's one of the most humble and down-to-earth men I know, but he puts on the façade of an elitist for my sake. He knows that I'm better than these streets, and that my "good looks" and my fighting prowess are wasted here. But, his antics only annoy me, and I disregard everything he says. Yes, I hate Rio and what it's done to my family and me, but this is the only place I've ever called home.

Today Felipe managed to scrape up enough money for some cheap pot, while Aislara, sister to one of the most powerful drug lords in Rio, brought some free cocaine. I don't do drugs, nor do I drink; I've tried it all before, so I know too well how much it hinders my focus. I can't practice Capoeira with my senses in the clouds. So I sit there in Gustavo's room and laugh at my silly friends.

"Come on, Christie, try some of this," Gustavo urges, blowing smoke out his nose. "I see stars in your hair! Have you gone to the moon and left us behind? Shame on you!"

"Yo man, lay off mah sister," Aislara purrs, ducking her head to snort a line of coke. "She need to keep a clear head. She gone' keep that Capoeira body saudável so she can defend yo skinny ass when you fuck shit up again."

"Vai-te foder," Gustavo snarls, and the room erupts into laughter. "More like so she can keep a clear head while Sevastian fucks her blind."

Sevastian smacks Gustavo upside the head, but the boy's so high he doesn't even feel it. I don't overlook the light blush that creeps over Sevastian's cheeks; across the room our eyes meet. That Sevastian is pure Brazilian gold; he's the handsomest of our little posse, the soul of Rio herself, with his smooth, bronzed skin, dark gray eyes and sinewy arms. He's definitely a good lay, and I've had him plenty. But it doesn't mean anything. Love is dangerous in Rio.

"'Tavo man, you're just jealous you can't get any girls," Felipe says, snatching the joint from Gustavo. "Especially one as fine as Christie."

We continue this kind of banter for hours, laughing over nothing and fighting over nothing, just a handful of lost souls trying to get through another day.

"You're gonna leave us one day."

The room quiets. Yesenia, with her long midnight hair and even blacker eyes, pierces me with her lazy but notoriously fierce gaze.

"Why would you say that, Yesenia? I love you all. I would never abandon you. Even if I leave, which I've done before, I'll always come back," I say, ardently believing in my words.

The girl smirks, twining and untwining her fingers in a nervous fidget. Of us all, Yesenia is the most unpredictable, the most violent—and also the most accurate in her seemingly farfetched predictions.

"One day you won't," she states with finality before snorting a line that Aislara passes to her.

"Senia," I begin to protest, but my friend seizes me into a hug and presses me close to her breast.

"No, my sister, no you will not," she whispers into my hair. "We are doomed here. You find that chance to get out, and you take it. Fight. Win. Eu não quero que você volte—I don't want you to come back."

"Eddy, where's Avô?"

"At the beach, where else?"

"What! But he's so sick! How could you let him go out—"

"Look, the old man wouldn't take no for an answer. You know how he is. I think some sun will do him good anyways."

Scowling, I open the windows, fanning out the stench of lavender incense and coconut oil. Our little shack reeks of the exotic fumes; as sweet smelling as they are, they easily become intoxicating and suffocating in such a cramped space.

"I thought I told him not to leave all these incense burning. One day I'm going to come home to a pile of ashes," I gripe, hating but secretly adoring my grandfather's careless habits.

"Serves this hell hole right."

I shoot Eddy a glare and give his dreadlocks a playful tug. He swats at my hand in irritation.

"Don't say that," I retort. "At least we have one another. At least we have Avô."

"Yeah, yeah," my burly friend grumbles, shoving the rest of his textbooks into his bag. "I'm off to class. Don't do anything stupid."

"I'm a big girl now, imão, you know that."

"That never stops those hood rats from trying to hurt you," Eddy retorts, his face darkening. "I don't get why you hang out with those idiot favelados. Você é muito forte. Muito inteligente—you're too strong. Too smart."

I laugh in response, throwing Eddy his jacket. "Hey now, fool, don't forget that we're favelados too. We ain't better than anyone else."

"Yes we are," he smirks, flinging me an envelope.

"What's this?" I ask, reopening the letter.

"Just read it."

I scan the letter quickly then meet Eddy's eyes.

"If we enter this time…if either you or I win…"

The Brazilian man nods. "It's a small shot, since Kazama will probably win again. But…if we do somehow pull it off, we could use the money to find a cure for your grandfather's sickness. He could spar with us again, walk tall along those damn beaches again."

Eddy and I look at each other a long while, thinking. Tears well up in my eyes, and I allow that dreaded sickness to enter my heart: hope.

"When do we leave?"

Yesenia was right.

I did leave. I did fight. But this time I am not going back.

Grandfather is dead. I failed him. Eddy insists that it isn't my fault, but it is, it really is. That tournament had been my one chance, a little street cockroach, to redeem myself and to save the person closest to my heart. Defeat means inadequacy, but it also means that I would never again hear my avô laugh or speak. I would never again be able to spar barefooted with him on the beach as the scarlet clouds swallowed the sun.

It means another earthquake, another time when my world would collapse and change forever. Another bullet through the cheek. Another lost lullaby and lingering nightmare.

For the first time since my seventh birthday, I cried for my parents. I cried for Grandfather. I cried for Eddy, who I would be abandoning for the next who knew how many years. And I cried for Gustavo, Aislara, Sevastian, Felipe and Yesenia, whom, crazy and impulsive as they were, had kept me sane for thirteen years.

"Where will you go Christie?" Eddy asks.

"America. I heard there are jobs there. Possibilities, you know?"

"You can't run forever, Christie. You were born to fight."

"I thought you told me that I was better than this place. That I deserved more. And now, when I have the chance to get out, you're saying that I am 'running' from my problems?" I snarl, turning to face him.

Eddy only sighs, knowing he had already lost.

"Then go, Christie. Go. I hope you find what you're looking for."

A week later, I find myself scrounging for employment and living in an apartment in conditions not much improved from those in Rio. But it's a start, and I know that I will find a way. If I had found my way in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, then I can do anything here. The sad thing is that it rains a lot here in the spring, and there is no beach in sight. There are no other Capoeiristas to practice my martial arts with.

I fear that Capoeira will lie forgotten within me as I focus too hard on surviving. But I will not abandon it. I must find a way to weave it back into my life.

"Hey there."

Startled, I turn to see a man standing next to me, a bright smile on his face. His dark eyes seem kind, gentle.

"Hi," I greet, suddenly becoming shy. He's very attractive.

"I see you're standing in front of Gabriel's, my favorite bar. Do you dance?"

It's an odd inquiry between strangers, but I reply, "Yes, I do…in a way. Is Gabriel's some sort of strip club? 'Cause I'm not into that kind of thing."

"Oh no, no. Gabe and Tiffany are looking for real talent here. I think they're hiring right now. You wanna check it out?"

"Yes!" I exclaim a bit too jubilantly, and the man flashes me an odd look.

"Sorry, I'm just super excited," I explain, trying in vain to calm down. "It's just that I'm new here, and I've been looking everywhere for a job."

"I guess it was meant to be then!" the man says with a grin as he extends his hand. "I'm Sam."

"Christie."

"Do you, ah, wanna get a cup of coffee afterward or something?"

"Coffee sounds great."

Portuguese/English Glossary

Mãe: mother

Pai: Father

Avô: grandfather

Favela: slum

Favelados: people who live in the slums

Cariocas: residents of Rio de Janeiro

Imão: brother

Saudável: healthy

Vai-te foder: fuck you