And When You Think Things Can’t Get Worse

“You have got to be kidding me!” Anna screeches at Oswald, the head waiter at the end of the shift. That terrible family that kept pushing for a table was bad enough but now Oswald was saying that they’re not getting their bonus money for coming to work during a holiday? This was just too much.

“You’re just not getting it now, they’ll pay you when they give you your salary,” Oswald explains. Anna rolls her eyes. She knows those stingy owners of the restaurant. If a customer swipes a tip instead of giving it cash or straight to the waiter’s e-wallet, you’ll never get it. It’s been three months working over here and Anna hadn’t received a single tip that hd been swiped. She’s been calculating that they must owe her over the equivalent of two hundred dollars now. Two hundred dollars that she desperately needs. Even without the swiped tips, the holiday money was promised at the end of the January first shift. Now they were giving her ridiculous excuses. 

“C’mon Anna, I’ll give you a lift home,” Jude tells her. He seems pissed. Anna decides to end her argument and leave with Jude. His car is parked  in the back of the restaurant where the employee’s entrance is along with the garbage cans, because with the way that the business owners treat their workers it’s clear that there is no distinction between trash and employee. Jude takes out a cigarette and begins to smoke. 

“Can I have a puff?” Anna asks him. He raises an eyebrow as he leans against his car. 

“Since when do you smoke?” He asks.

“Since I’m stressed,” Anna tells him and extends her hand. He hands her the cigarette. She takes a few puffs and coughs. Jude laughs.

‘Let’s go,” he tells her.

“I owe you five bucks as per usual arrangement?” Anna asks him. Jude shakes his head. 

“This ride is on the house. You probably don’t have the money anyway after the way that Oswald screwed us over,” he tells her. 

“What do you mean?”

“I heard from the kitchen staff that the owner offered Oswald fifty dollars per day if he could get us to come on the last day of December and January first and he made it sound like we would all get the same. He was given his hundred dollars as soon as our shift ended. He’s lying to us that the hundred dollars will come when our salaries come in,” Jude explains. Anna feels my heart sink to my toes. Tears begin to swell up in her eyes before she can stop them and she sniffs.

“Aw, Anna come on,” Jude says. Tears are now flowing freely down her face. She wipes them away with her sleeve but soon she’s sobbing.

“It’s just too much!” She wails. Jude nods and lets her have her cry. Soon he’s at her house. She’s stopped crying now but is sniffing.

“Hey, things will be okay, you know?” He tells her. She gives him a smile. 

“Thanks for the ride,” she tells him.

“No problem, today was my last day anyway,” Jude tells her. She looks at him in shock.

“I thought that you had a few more days left!’

“Nah,  I only stayed after we received our salaries because I thought that we would get some money today,” he tells me. 

“They sure hoodwinked all of us didn’t they?” Anna says. She smiles at him. “Well shit happens. Hopefully we’ll meet again under better circumstances,” she smiles one last time and heads to her house. She knocks on the door. Jude’s car drives away. Her mother doesn’t answer. She knocks again.

“Who is it?” Mrs. Moyo asks from the lounge. 

“Anna,” Anna responds tiredly. Mrs. Moyo opens the door with a suspicious glare on her face. Anna walks inside. Her mother is weirdly quiet. Anna takes a shower and changes into her pajamas. She goes to the kitchen to check if there’s anything to eat and nibbles on a few slices of bread.

“They call those munchies don’t they?’ Mrs. Moyo asks Anna in a dangerously low voice. The type of voice that only means that Anna is in serious trouble. “You lied that you went to work and smoked marijuana and had sex with that guy who dropped you off didn’t you?”

Anna pauses. Shocked by the ridiculousness of the accusation.

“Don’t look at me like that! I saw that your eyes were red when you walked in like one of those people that take marijuana,” Mrs. Moyo growls at Anna.

“My eyes were red because I was crying! Jesus!” Anna tries to explain, she dodges a slap from her mother. 

“Crying from having sex with that guy that dropped you off?” Her mother is starting to scream now. Anna doesn’t have the strength for this. She runs out of the kitchen and locks herself in the bathroom. Her own bedroom can’t be locked. Her mother is banging on the door, telling her to get the hell out of her house. Anna feels tears welling up again and she lets them fall silently. She can’t cry in front of her mother. She stopped letting her mother’s behaviour make her cry when she was in high school when her mother was being impossible as usual. She had been fifteen and had cried. Her mother had yelled at her even louder and told her to stop crying, she didn’t want Anna spreading her demons in the house. 

“You’re a demon child! You have the spirit of corpses which is why you aren’t doing anything with your life! And you come here smoking marijuana and sleeping with men!,” her mother yells from outside the door. “Get out of my house!’ 

Anna eventually stops crying as her mother continues to insult and yell obscenities at her. She starts to get irritated and gives her mother the middle finger through the door. Something that she wouldn’t do to her face unless she wanted to die but that small vulgar act of defiance makes her feel good in that moment. She takes her phone out of her pocket. She bought the data bundle for eight gigabytes a few weeks ago, there’s still some data left. She starts to go through videos on TikTok about sugar dating and this website called Seeking Arrangements keeps popping up. She sees girls that are of questionable beauty brag about having their university tuition and their entire lifestyles sponsored by their sugar daddies that they’re not sleeping with. Anna sighs as she watches those videos. That sounds perfect to her. She’s no virgin despite her mother’s constant efforts to have a violent and psychologically abusive ‘virginity protection program,’ she had sex with the guy that she dated she was twenty about four times. He had a small dick though and because she’s under her mom’s roof she can’t have sex without being thrown out on the streets. In fact when her mother  found out that she had had sex with her then boyfriend she had taken Anna to deliverance at a local church. So she was very virgin adjacent and didn’t want to just fuck around. 

It was very unfair that her entire life she had been repressed and controlled. Made to feel like she’s doing something bad when in fact she’s doing nothing at all. A sugar daddy giving her even one thousand dollars would be the boost that she would need in order to get out of this hellish environment. She checks how much data she has left on her phone. She’s got two point three gigabytes left. That enough to check out Seeking Arrangements. She opens an account and starts to scroll through people’s profiles. There don’t seem to be many quality ones that are that side of the hemisphere. She sighs. The banging on the bathroom door has stopped now. But better safe than sorry. She might sleep in the bathroom tonight. She has the next two days off anyway. She sighs and puts her head in her hands. This is what her life has come to a twenty-seven year old hiding in the bathroom from her mother. She puts her head back up and starts to message every single profile that she can. 

After thirty minutes there’s knocking on the door. This time gentle. 

“I need to use the toilet,” Mrs. Moyo tells her from the other side. The pros of only having one bathroom in the house. She sighs. Hides her phone in her bra in case her mother sees it and tries to break it. There have been times that her mother has threatened to break her phone and laptop. She opens the door. Mrs. Moyo’s face is neutral. She goes into the toilet and Anna heads to her room. She takes her study desk and leans it against her bedroom door so that her mother doesn’t just barge in whenever she feels the whimsy or wants to accuse her of something else. 

She sets down her blankets on the floor as she does every night and settles down. She continues to go through people’s profiles. A lot of them are  bisexual women that are looking for a third in their marriage. Anna is not interested in having sex with these men though or women. She only wants to have sex under her own terms. She’s already been forced for years to not have sex by her mother, she definitely will not go to the polar opposite and be forced to have sex she really doesn’t want to have in order to just survive on her own. Staying with her mother has not gotten that bad yet or had it?

Someone has already messaged her back. It’s a man from a country in Eastern Europe. 

-Send me your W******p number- he texts. Anna pauses and thinks about it. The best thing about being in a country like Zimbabwe is that it is nearly impossible for someone from another country to be able to track you down. She sends it to him and he begins to ask her how much she charges for sex. Anna pauses. What the hell? The website said that it wasn’t about sex.

-I’m not a sex worker- she texts him back.

-What if I pay you ten thousand euros?- he asks her.

At that moment Anna pauses and wonders how much she values her pussy,ten thousand euros would be enough to move anywhere she wanted and be fully free from the tyranny of her mother. Is she willing to have sex for money?

-Show me your black pussy- he texts her. Anna’s eyes widen and her nose flares. What the actual hell did that guy just say to her? Actually no, it’s not worth it, she can get a platonic sugar daddy with some effort, not some person trying to use the website to find an easy A. She blocks him and the ten thousand euros. Her stomach turns at the thought of how much money she is potentially turning down. 

“He’s probably a liar. He’d fuck you and promise to send the money and never do it,” her voice of reason tells her.  “And you have a low tolerance for bullshit. You wouldn’t even be able to fake that you were enjoying sex with him. Especially since he seems like such a creep,”

“Bitch, I’d pretend he was Brad Pitt in his twenties if I had to in order to get that money,” her voice of not-so-much-reason counters.

Anna groans as falls back into her blankets. 

“You could have bought a bed bitch,” the voice of lack of reason chides her. Anna can hear her mother walking up and down the hall. She seems to have calmed down. Anna knows that there are times that her mother regrets her erratic behaviour. She once accidentally overheard her talking to another woman asking her how she can get better at not saying nasty things to her daughter. That had been when she was nineteen. Whatever advice that woman had given her mother though had not worked because she just got worse as the years went by. Mrs. Moyo had way too much pride to ever admit that she was ever wrong or that what she did to her daughter was ever wrong.

“You could have been outta this hellhole bitch,” the voice in her head says. “You’d never have to see your abuser again,” Anna sighs. There will be other opportunities with non-perverted men. Another message comes in. It’s another guy from Eastern Europe, considerably younger than the first guy. He also asks for her W******p number and Anna begins to wonder if she needs to get a W******p specifically for these guys. Her phone is dual sim. The first thing that the guy sends is a dick pic. Anna rolls her eyes and blocks him.

Honestly if women wanted to see a nice dick they would go to xvideos. Unsolicited dick pics. Yuck. This is a bit of a rough start. She decides to check out two videos on YouTube about sugar dating to see what she’s doing wrong. 

The first video is from a black woman in Italy who’s sugar daddy bought her a villa there. Anna looks on enviously. She doesn’t need all that though, she just needs enough to give her a jumpstart to an independent life. The fully sponsored life as glamorous as it sounds and appears fades in beauty when Anna thinks that she would have to put up with a guy that she probably doesn’t like most of the time in order to keep that life going. Anna values her freedom, even more so now that she’s been through her mother who has basically allowed her no freedom at all. 

The second video is from a black girl that says that sugar daddies can be found anywhere even at the local gas station. Just stroke a man’s ego well enough and he’ll open up the gates of his wallet to you. She explains that men that know that they are way higher up than you socio-economically tend not to give you much because they think that they’re better than you. (“That would explain the first guy’s audacity,” Anna thinks to herself) But if you go for a guy that can’t tell that he’s better off than you financially and closer to you, you’ll get more money off of him because he’ll think that he’s lucky to have you and go all out on you. Going out with a guy that is visibly below your league can be dangerous because he’ll know that you just want him for his money. 

Anna goes back to her phone with new eyes. This is going to require a lot of strategizing and seeing where she fits in Anna realizes. She closes her eyes and leans back into her blankets again. She’s too tired to think deeply at the moment and needs to sleep before she really plans how she’s going to get her sugar daddy.