The Helpless Old Woman by Katerine Tarasenko

Hey, wake up soon, you hear?  I'll kick you out of bed now!

Mickey barely opened her eyes and saw in front of her ... another groundhog day.  She is again lying in someone's bed, mascara is smeared on her face, Mickey goes to wash and looks for her handbag.  After such morning rituals, she always wants to believe that she took the money in advance and will not have to remind the customer about them.

As you may have guessed, Mickey is an escort.  A girl who sells her body (although she herself stubbornly proves that she sells time, but details can be missed).  She has been earning this way for her "bread with butter and caviar" for 5 years.  And she's also a cocaine addict.  Inveterate, because not everyone can sleep soberly with crowds of men.  And she can't either.  Every time she comes to a new customer, she makes several tracks, drags on with all her might, and after a couple of moments she becomes someone who can be paid a thousand bucks a night.

She feels nasty every morning.  Very careless, distracted, her own life is more and more like Russian roulette, but she is in no hurry to refuse.  In her hometown, Mickey has long become a star of local publics, where city boys and girls write various mockeries in her direction.  But there are even worse situations: somehow her grandmother was standing in the market and selling berries, and Mickey's old acquaintances defiantly spit on her basket.  Frank abomination to take revenge on a helpless old woman for the sins of her granddaughter.

Taxi to the house, scrolling the key ... finally I'm home.  It's hard to call it home though.  If it weren’t for another daddy, who would then need to be intensely thanked, she would continue to live in a communal apartment with her mother.

Sick mother.

She was 13 when her mother was diagnosed with a malignant tumour.  Then she brought all her savings from under the mattress and said:

—daughter, this is all that I could accumulate in my life.  I hope this lasts until you come of age, and then promise me to go to work and become a human. 

Then Mickey didn't promise anything.  She asked her mother for a little money to buy notebooks for herself, and she herself went to a second-hand store and chose the most decent dress and heels of all that were there, and bought lipstick and foundation with change.  That evening, she flipped through a couple of pages with vacancies and found the solution to all her questions.

I fall on the bed, half asleep.  The back is terribly numb, apparently, someone had a lot of fun yesterday.  I call my mother, I ask if she took her medicine today and find out how she feels overall.  She had difficult chemo three years ago and is now in remission.  Enough positive, but not final.

Is it worth it?  It's not for us to judge.  But every time, taking the next track, she thought that thanks to this track, the dearest person in her life is still alive.  And she went and worked on.