Your arrival in Mexico, in the shabby gazebo.
But this gazebo represented her first real home.
She had scrubbed the place so cleanly with Jessica that one could eat from the floor.
They were like young dogs by their own 20 square meters and exhausted laugh fell on the saggy mattress of the double bed.
The rusty hinges had shrieked in protest, and Jessica had always said that this antique would eventually collapse under her butt.
But the little one should be wrong, that damned bed withstood untold burdens in a very particular night.
And in the end, their refuge was desecrated and the ground soaked in blood.
Laila remembered as if it had been yesterday.
She came in a good mood from Jos Local with two hot dogs and a bottle of Coke under her arm, when she saw from afar that the door of her bower was open.
Laila felt the warm wind of the night on her skin, she smelled the smell of food that flowed through the outdoor fan of Jos Locals to her and how the blond hairs of her forearms warned.
Jessica always kept the door locked when she was alone.
The Girl had vehemently told her that, and the kid, who had so many bad experiences for her young life that it would last for more than two rebirths, was always scrupulous.
Laila hesitantly walked towards the door.
Carefully she set foot on the creaking wooden floorboards of the porch.
Deep inside, her instincts came in and shouted, "Run away, fuck yourself."
As if in a trance, she turned off the hot-dogs and Coke on the porch and opened the door, only enough to allow her to quietly slip into the interior of the arbour.
With a lithe motion, she reached for the metal baseball bat, which was leaning against the wall near the door.
As her left hand closed around the cold metal and she felt the reassuring weight of the bat, she simultaneously felt the stifling air inside—she took a deep breath.
Her nostrils shook like an excited racehorse just before the start.
It smelled like copper aroma of blood and the much stronger smell of ammonia in male semen. Everything in her screamed again, not to take the next step.
With another step, she would get a clear view of the rusty, old bed.
Laila had lifted her left foot to the next step as she froze a rough, male whisper.
The words reached their ears, but their brains refused to grasp their meaning.
"Little princess, no one has ever given me so much pleasure as you. As thanks I will drown you in my juice. It's a pity you will not remember it. But you are still warm, and so tight ..."
The voice died in a deep sigh.
Laila stepped mechanically into the middle of the room.
She felt her cold sweat trickling down her back in slow rivulets.
The sight that offered itself burned indelibly into her memory.
It felt like a bad movie.
With her back to her stood a fat man with his pants down.
His wobbly buttocks jerked.
He stood wide-legged at the foot of the bed, blocking her view of what lay ahead.
She stepped aside two steps and saw Jessica.
Her beloved Jessica, for whom she felt responsible.
Jessica's eyes were dull, her throat a single raspberry-red swollen mass, her small breasts littered with scratch marks, bright red blood on her sheets between her splayed legs.
Laila's heart seemed to be pumping cold in jerky waves through her veins until she felt like a block of ice.
Her teeth clattered against each other.
At the sound, the fat man's head jerked in her direction as fast as an arrow.
As he turned, she saw that he had one hand tightly closed around his steeply erect penis.
As he turned in her direction, he tangled himself in his dropped pants and tripped stooping in her direction.
The ice broke.
Laila swung the baseball bat against his head with both hands.
When the bat clapped against his left side of the skull, there was a sound as if a raw egg fell to the ground.
The man broke down immediately.
Under its enormous weight, the wooden floor shook.
She did let go of the baseball bat and rushed to Jessica.
Laila dropped to her knees beside the bed and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead with trembling fingers.
In a budding hope she shook Jessica by the shoulders.
The girl's head rolled back and forth like a doll.
How long she had crouched next to Jessica, holding her cold hand in her numb fingers, she could not say.
Laila's immobilisation lasted until she heard a low groan behind her.
With a jerk she jumped up and hurried out into the garden.
Frantically, she looked around.
Her eyes fell on a rusty hedge trimmer lying on the stained table outside on the porch.
She grabbed the scissors and severed the clothesline, which was stretched over half the porch.
The rusty thing worked - good.
Laila hurried back to the arbour.
As she passed, she closed her fingers around the top rung of an old wooden chair and placed it behind Jessica's tormentor.
As the fat pig sat up dizzy, she pushed him into the chair and tied his upper body with the clothesline to the back of the chair.
Laila stepped in front of the man to take a closer look.
He was in his early fifties, with tight-set, dark eyes in a rough face.
Particularly striking were his full, beaded lips.