This was originally written as a part of a much longer work which may appear here eventually. I've pulled it out because I think it could stand on its own.
If I've screwed up the relative worth of the monetary amounts in this, I'm sorry. It was hard trying to figure out the value of that form of currency at that time and in that part of the world.
If you remove the nature of one of the protagonists, what you're left with is a bit of a modern storybook romance - which is what I intended it to be underneath everything. Feedback is always welcome.
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21,753 feet above sea level,
Descending
Mont-Laurier, Quebec
Canada, June, 1986
Oksana woke up feeling a bit stiff from napping in her seat. She smirked, thinking that at least she couldn't complain about feeling cramped. At four feet, ten inches, Oksana felt as though she must be one of the few people here who could find at least a little room in the seats, if not a lot of comfort. Looking out of the window, she saw clouds far below and bright blue sky above.
So it was daytime now.
She overheard a child asking one of the stewardesses if they were still over the ocean in a small and uncomfortable way which hid a bit of fear. The no-doubt smiling reply was that they'd been over land for a couple of hours now. Oksana hoped the girl would feel better. Her own realization from it was that her point of no-return on this trip - the imaginary line far below where she would have bid her old life goodbye - had come and gone long ago and she'd missed it altogether.
After checking to be sure that her seating companion was still asleep, she reached into her pocket and consulted her hand-written briefing sheet, the one the man with one name had given her. She read it all rather automatically for maybe the thousandth time. Oksana had gone beyond mere memorization, once the reality of her situation had begun to sink in some weeks before.
She now felt that she'd never be able to forget each letter of every word. She felt a little odd about it as she read, trying to stay focused on the meaning of the words. She'd need to be able to recall every fact if she was asked by the customs people, or border police, or whatever they had where she was going. She also knew that sometime very soon, she was going to have to eat the paper to make it disappear.
She heard the cabin announcement system come on with a muted chime and then she listened to the pilot drone on about beginning their approach to Toronto Pearson International Airport, wherever that was, and that it was a sunny morning there and 17 degrees Celsius on its way to a forecast high of 23. In reality, she knew exactly where it was. She'd gotten at least an overview of the geography of where she was going as another part of the insane series of events which now led her here.
She looked over at her seating companion, a sleeping, brassy, long-legged blonde who had made the most of her opportunity to avail herself of the free drinks out over the Atlantic. They'd had at least a bare minimum of conversation during the flight. Comparing notes, the blonde had finally admitted to being an exotic dancer by profession. Oksana had her doubts, judging by the barely-concealed fear that the blonde had of the man seated across the aisle. At least she wasn't wearing an invisible leash like the blonde was, she thought. Then again, she rationalized, for a lot of this, she'd worn one as well. The difference was that hers was quite a bit longer.
When they'd talked. the dancer had looked her up and down, making some sort of judgement of her, and wondering no doubt why anyone would want to import a girl with such little obvious appeal. They hadn't spoken of it, but they both knew the score.
The trouble was that Oksana didn't know the rest of the music. She only had her other instructions, the ones which she'd memorized long before stepping onto the first plane in Kiev.
The blonde had assumed that Oksana was bound to the same sort of arrangement that she was. Oksana herself didn't know what she'd been bound to. The dancer had been surprised when Oksana had said that she wasn't any sort of personal entertainer. She was a gardener looking to start a business, she'd said as she pushed the metal frames of her glasses just a little higher on her nose. Oksana had maintained an open and honest front about it, but the dancer hadn't bought a word of it.
"Have it your own way," she'd said finally, "nobody flies from Kiev to London to Toronto to be a gardener, unless she has to let somebody plow her own little patch while her ass is in the air and her nose is in the dirt. That's the only sort of gardening that we're all going to be doing. I hope you really don't believe that shit, if somebody told you that."
Oksana had been thankful that her companion had gone to sleep not long after.
The clouds outside looked a bit larger and broken now and Oksana assumed that they were descending. She could see larger and larger glimpses of land still far below her. She quietly tore the worn paper into little pieces to put them into her mouth discreetly and began to chew and swallow as she thought back to what had led her here. The man across the aisle was the only one who noted it with a tiny nod, and Oksana realized that he'd also been there to watch her as well and now considered that he had only the one woman to watch. She'd been an extra assignment, apparently.
She slipped her ring off her hand and scratched her own cheek in a bored way, watching him. He looked away as though he'd lost any interest in her. She replaced the ring on her middle finger as she considered what it meant.
Her invisible collar was off as of this moment.
Oksana had grown up on the streets, a diminutive girl whose naturally sweet, strawberry looks and light brown hair had gotten her out of many jams and tight spots all of her life. One look at her, and no one would have believed that she was a pickpocket, thief, shoplifter, bookie's runner, and whatever else she'd had to do in her efforts to stay alive. In her own opinion, she was at best, barely interesting to most men on a sexual level. She just happened to be cute in a childlike, quiet, and bittersweet way. The things which came through about her to become other people's first impressions of her were the same things which had saved her twenty-two year-old ass so often. Nobody wanted to believe that she wasn't the cute, bookish little thing which they saw, and hardly anyone wanted to screw someone as forgettable and lost--looking as Oksana, besides the very occasional forgettable and lost-looking boy.
She hated that about herself, but knew that without it, she'd likely have been dead long ago.
She was Ukrainian by accident of where her mother was living when her water had broken. The daughter of a stranded Russian whore and a young barely able drunkard and part-time pimp, her lost-mouse-in-the-library looks were all that she had. She didn't look like her father at all, and of course she knew why that was. Her mother had thrown her out as soon as her pimp was dead from alcohol poisoning. He'd obviously had no biological link to her, but he had loved her in his way and had at least tried now and then to be something of a father to her.
