They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

County Jail

County jail was not prison. It wasn’t her mother’s warm embrace, but it wasn’t prison. Prison was coming. She no longer viewed her trial with any remote sense of optimism. When she found herself entertaining even vaguely hopeful thoughts, she bit the inside of her lip until blood gushed across her tongue. The taste of blood reminded her not to hope. She saw her trial only as a rest stop on the way to prison, a bureaucratic hiccup, a way for the masses to avoid culpability. Never mind that she was innocent, she was going away for the better part of twenty years.

“Prison.” She liked to say the word. She liked to play with the word. “On. Sip. Son. No. Sin. In. Nip. Pin. Sir.”

But it wouldn’t be called a prison, not where she was headed. It would be called a correctional facility for women. She wondered what flaws in her character the facility would be correcting. She wondered what she would do with her days and how long it would be before she was raped by a guard or one of the other correctees.

Women had come on to her in county, but she’d been able to turn down the offers without much trouble. The state had a vested interest in keeping her protected at least until the charade of the trial was through. But she had decided to surrender to the next woman who approached her. Better to face it and get it over with, she thought. Maybe she could learn to like it. The dream was all tapped out of her, leaving numbness in its stead.

She wouldn’t be old when she got out, but that was somehow moot. She already felt old, ancient, tired. She just wanted to go to sleep and sleep until she turned to dust. Unfortunately the mechanisms which protected her from the other women in county also protected her from her dreams of sleep. In one sense, she couldn’t wait for the trial to be done with. She had even toyed with the idea of copping a plea. And then, in the dark of her cell, she could lay herself down to sleep.