by Aurianna

Created on: November 13, 2008

Nothing that had happened in Gabrielle Lotton's admittedly short lifetime could have prepared her for the sight she saw when she stepped out of the battered old Chevy pick-up she shared with her slightly crippled father. She had tread delicately through the ankle-deep mud to gaze over the brink of the crater that was the city dump, and when her eyes landed on the scene below, she froze in her tracks.

"Don't worry, Gabby, you'll get used to the smell in a few minutes." Her father said, hobbling up behind her with his cane, cursing when the end of it sunk into the mud; Gabrielle barely registered his words or the soft sucking sound the cane made as it was wrenched free of the muck under foot.

For the sight below, in the center of the junk, trash, and other unidentifiable objects, made her ill.

There were people down there.

A whole family, it looked like.

And they were cooking slightly rotten food over a fire in an old metal trash can.

"Gabby, for Heaven's sake, get over here and help me with this da-" her father was saying.

Gabrielle cut him off, "Pa, do they live in there?" She hadn't moved from the brink of the crater.

"Is that what's gotten into you? The hobos?" He had dropped the edge of the torn up old sofa they had come to dispose of and picked his way back to her, leaning heavily on his cane as he indifferently took in the same scene that was so troubling to his teenage daughter.

Gabrielle watched, horrified, as the people moved easily amongst the waste; some were sleeping on discarded mattresses, others sat huddled with their backs up against mounds of bags or rusted-out cars. The ones who were roasting something on the make-shift spit were talking, scowling, and taking swigs out of bottles that she couldn't quite make out from her position.

They were so...dirty. Gabrielle couldn't imagine for one moment ever letting her skin become so grimy, so blackened with dirt and sweat and who knew what else.

"Pa, isn't there anything we could do for them?" She turned suddenly to face the hunched-over, expressionless man beside her.

"And just what would you have us do, Gabby?" He asked her, running a weathered hand over the stubble on an equally weathered face.

She bit her lip as she thought about it, ignoring the brisk March wind that whipped her hair around her young face. "I don't know, couldn't we- couldn't we give them something? Money?"

Seeing that she just didn't understand, her father stood silently for a moment. How could he, a role model for an impressionable young

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