My pen-mates are arranging themselves on their pallets when Yandi and I return to the great room. It’s ten minutes to 6:00. The baby-faced warden is still positioned by the door, a few yards from the blue dumpster. Yandi winks at him as we walk in and then saunters off to help the kitchen workers fix our plates.
Even though the menu never changes, an excited murmur fills the air as meal time nears. It’s one of the few bright spots in our day, aside from our daily sun hour and the oil bath.
I don’t have an appetite, but I accept the plate handed to me by a young Latina with a rose tattoo on her neck. She looks close to my age and she averts her eyes, almost apologetic, as she passes out the food. Dinner is avocados and nuts with an unappetizing slab of haddock in the middle. I’m still shaken from the horrors I witnessed in the Assembly Room, but I have to stay calm. I can’t let on that I know.
Sensing someone staring at me, I look up, locking eyes with Fern. She isn’t eating either. She stirs the tiny mountain of avocado mush with her finger. I don’t want to think about Fern, Grace or any of my pen-mates stretched out on racks – stretched to snapping – like flightless bats. I prefer to think of the teen somewhere coasting down the sidewalk on her skateboard.
“You gonna eat that?”
It’s Leticia, a Modern Coffee sitting to my right. She gestures to the fish on my plate. I pick up the lukewarm fillet and hand it to her. Our fingers touch.
“I was going to ask you for that.” Robyn, a dark-brown girl, sits across from me, watching the exchange. Her hair is starting to grow back in, black and bristly. She purses her lips like a child, although she’s at least eighteen. “You gave ‘Ticia your fish last night.”
“Closed mouth don’t get fed,” Leticia says. As she stuffs fish in her mouth, I scrutinize her face, her head. Leticia’s naked scalp bears twin ridges near her hairline, one on each side of her temple, about several inches long. Those dents could be scars left over from infancy, the result of forceps used during a difficult delivery.
I glance around the room at the bald heads of my pen-mates, as if I can glean the story of their lives from a scab or keloid. Can they interpret my scars? You can tell by the way some girls duck their head when you speak to them that they are more embarrassed by the absence of hair than they are by the absence of clothes.
I wish I could clothe them all, some new skin, impervious to branding and scraping and pickling. I wish I could offer them something more than day-old fish and rough cotton bedding fresh from the dryer. I wish we didn’t have to watch the sunset through the windows of a former guitar factory, where the only music is the buzzing and whirring of machines in the belly of a building with a lust for our blood.
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