The darkest passage I've ever written:

From the work in progress:

From the door, I watched Lessa take out out a handsome canister of tea. “We scavenged in the town when nobody was looking," she nattered on in her childish cadences. The camping store came in handy. We got our sleeping bags there, and the stove. We should have grabbed the jerky, but we went for the mixed nuts instead.”

“I have water here. Can we boil it on the stove for the tea?”

“Oh, yes,” Lessa said. ”There’s Maura. You might want to get away from the door.” I walked toward the truck and watched a taller girl of about fifteen stalk into the building, holding another small lantern. Like Lessa, she looked a little too thin. 

“You’re not parole, are you?” Maura scowled at me after I brought the water a short distance inside the building and shifted back into the doorway to talk. 

“No. To be honest, I don’t think they come around here any more,” I assured her.

“She’s Annie,” Lessa explained. “She can’t come in because she’s afraid she’ll make us sick.”

Maura sighed. “You know how we get food around here?” 

“No,” I said warily, “how do you get food around here?”

“We eat wild dogs. We trap birds. If we’re really hungry, we eat leaves and grass, but they make us sick. You don’t look gay, but if you did, I’d offer to have sex with you for a trade. I definitely would if you were a guy. It wouldn’t matter how sick you were.” Maura popped the last piece of jerky in her mouth.

“Has anyone given you gold for a trade?” I asked, playing with an idea similar to what I had done in other places.

“Are you kidding?” Maura scoffed. “If we had some gold, we could go down to town and someone would take us into the work house. House and feed us for life.”

I was puzzled. “Why would you have to pay them to get them to take you in to make money for them?”

“They say they wouldn’t get a return on us if they didn’t. They want a guarantee against us running away. Lots of people run away from the workhouse, and then they’ve lost all that food they’ve put in the tummies.” I personally thought those people who bought into the workhouse were getting ripped off.

When the water started to boil, Lessa scooped water into each of the dollhouse cups she had set down, and put a pinch of the tea in each. She threw a bag of jerky into the boiling water and fished pieces out with a fork.

“Would you want to go to the workhouse?” I inquired as the girls sat devouring their jerky, almost too fast to chew it.

“I had to kill a man the other day,” Maura shrugged. 

I felt lightheadedness flow over me as I sat down in the doorway. “Why?” 

“He tried to strangle her,” Lessa chimed in. “They were having sex. She flipped them over and banged his head against the concrete one too many times.”

I sat too stunned to speak. 

“We dragged him into the bushes,” Maura shrugged. She took a bite from her jerky. “We’ve had to fend for ourselves most of our lives. Living like this isn’t much different.”