There was something poking in her arm. She grasped at it without opening her eyes, and felt... a small tube?

When her eyes flicked open, she was blinded by the fluorescence, and her memory immediately flashed back to yesterday. It was yesterday, right? She was lying in a hospital bed and her head was throbbing. Before she had a chance to gather her bearings, a decrepit-looking nurse screamed at her. "GOOD, you're up! It's time to get the hell out of here." She stood over Edna, rapping her pen on the bed frame, staring. "No insurance, no doctors, no bed," the nurse rattled off as she pulled out the IV puncturing her arm.

Hardly conscious, Edna crawled out of the bed and walked through the swinging doors and back out on to the street. She stood there for what seemed like hours, trying to figure out where she was, what had happened, and how she looked - a ratty-clothed woman with a huge bloody bandage over one eye swaying with the wind.

She studied her arms, which were slightly scratched but not much worse for wear. A loose white armband hung around her right wrist. "Edna J. Nox, Age 19." Edna. She had hated her name from the first time it left her mouth as a toddler. E-d-n-a. Images of horribly-aged women in nursing homes clouded her mind. Her damn name had been the first glance into her lifetime of spite towards her parents. It was always the little things. On her birthday, she asked for red shoes and got blue. They packed her a PB&J every day in elementary school; jelly made her cringe. As Edna got older, the disconnect between her parents only grew. The night after her 18th birthday, she slipped away on a Greyhound.

A few miles down the road, she finally glanced the overpass that signaled the entrance into her little shanty of a town. As she made her way down Katz, a single white feather flew past her head. It looked like a chicken feather, but that made absolutely no sense. Was she hallucinating?

As Edna walked back through the foyer at Wilshire Tower and rode the elevator back to the 12th floor, she expected glances. She spent her working days trying to stay hidden and out of the way; the lack of attention was getting to her. Surely, she thought, someone cared she was a ratty bloody mess. But no one even turned their head as she shuffled by, grasping her bandage. She entered her room intending to change, but soon realized that her only last clean shirt was on her, caked with blood and shredding. Maybe, she hoped as she gathered her clothes and headed to the laundromat, someone on the street would have enough decency to wonder.

So Edna walked up the alley and crossed over the basketball court to reach the laundromat. She took no notice when her sneaker stepped down upon a slowly fading stain on the blacktop. She reached the front door, only to pull fruitlessly. She knew that woman is always here, that asian-looking one. Oh well, she'd have to wait. She knew all hope for attention was lost, however, when she slunk down against the laundromat's window, and immediately blended in with all of the other homeless miscreants in this town with no one who cared.