“A smell overwhelmed her. It was a humid smell. It was that girl. It was Jonie. She fainted. As she started to fall, she saw Jonie leaning over her. She was laughing.
Later, that night, Mary opened her eyes. She was in her bunk, the room was swimming and titling around her. She must
have hit her head. Everything was so dizzy. She heard a rustling
sound, someone getting up, walking toward her. Jonie’s face
loomed, tilted, an uprooted tree. She was naked. Her body glis-
tened, and that humid smell grew even thicker.
‘OK’.
Jonie was watching Mary intensely, the whole time smiling
so hard and bright, Mary fell into it. Jonie asked Mary if she was
a good girl. If she was going to be a good girl and be as quiet as
Jonie was being. Jonie walked across the room to a row of sinks,
her strange, otherworldly frequency trailing behind her. She
grabbed Mary’s toothbrush. She came back. She took the tooth-
brush, dry, bristle-side up, and jammed it into Mary’s cunt. She
rubbed and rubbed the toothbrush inside of Mary. “I’m making
you clean and good,” she said. It was very deep. Mary got the
toothbrush so wet it kept sliding out. Jonie told her that she was
bad. She hit her in the face and laughed. Mary shook and the
metal bunk rattled. She came so violently that she thought she
was splitting open. Everything went dark.
In the morning, Mary opened her eyes and saw blood all
over the sheets. She lifted up her the orange shirt of her prison
uniform. There were claw marks on her stomach. And her own
skin was stuck under her nails.
Mary loved Jonie.
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moved? The only inmate she had befriended at the women’s
prison, Charlene, would not talk to her anymore. She sat with
a new group at lunch and looked at Mary strangely from the
corner of her eye. Mary noticed Charlene whispering to some
guards.
Mary saw Jonie through a door as her cell group walked down, Jonie laughed, and everything went dark, like earth, like
Jonie’s sweat.
Mary was gone. She was in a new room, with one bed, by
herself. Everyone who came in had badges that read “MD.”
These men asked her lots of questions about her mother and
the few years she had spent at boarding school.
Mary wanted Jonie. She refused to brush her teeth. She
thought about killing herself, but there weren’t any tools. The
people here seemed to anticipate that move.
Mary jerked awake. The window had been pried open. The
air was heavy in the room. She smelled Jonie, she heard Jonie
laughing.
“Go get your fucking toothbrush honey,” Jonie said.
Mary was falling through a window, into something else.”