Millersville

By Brendan Detzner

The Illinois Youth Center in Millersville is a maximum security prison for teenage girls. There are no newspapers allowed in the facility, no internet, no TV news. No way to tell that something in the world on the other side of the fence has gone very wrong. 

Brendan Detzner's short fiction has appeared in Podcastle, Pseudopod, Chizine, One Buck Horror, Tales to Terrify, the Exigencies anthology from Dark House Press, and many other venues. He is the author of several novels and short story collections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brendan Detzner
• Release date: Oct 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393297123

Book preview

The Queen

The Queen’s driver was nervous as they passed the final checkpoint, but the Queen didn’t seem to care, she was still having fun, still talking. The Queen hardly ever stopped talking. The Queen’s driver had long since come to accept that the better part of his job was to be a punching bag, someone for the Queen to throw words at.

It was different then what he’d seen on television before he’d met her in person. There’d been at least three different Queens, just like there’d been three or four different Elvis’. The driver’s parents had known the Queen who talked softly and quoted bible verses and spent a lot of time standing next to powerful people, the Queen who had another name that she hardly used now. She was not yet the Queen the driver had grown up with, the Queen who cut men to pieces on talk shows with less than a sentence.

The Queen was now the Queen, always, everywhere. Even for her driver, who saw her every day, who heard her expound on every stray thought that crossed her mind, she never slipped, never became ordinary. Maybe some day it would happen and he’d have something to tell his children about.

Crisis points in people’s lives are the most important, though, people don’t take them seriously enough. There are a number of reasons for that, they’re harder to see, harder to write a book about, at least a book anyone will take seriously. People don’t trust biographies. You have to wonder what’s wrong with the person who wrote the book, that they would throw away so much of their own lives looking through the minutia of someone else’s. And even if you take the time to look, those kinds of moments are invisible, sometimes, usually. If they’re moments at all. When the dam breaks the dam has always been breaking...

They were alone, the only car in sight. Chunks of the barrier that had divided the highway were lying in pieces on the road, forcing the driver to change lanes to avoid them. They came to the beginning of the skyway. The bridge had collapsed. A crumbling, jagged edge, then open air.

Trip’s not cancelled, the Queen said. We don’t need to take the highway.

The driver put the car in reverse, backed up a quarter mile to the last exit, and left the highway. He took the ramp, very slowly. As he reached the bottom a man the size of a refrigerator stepped out from behind a support pillar. He was wearing a dirty green T-shirt and he was holding a baseball bat.

The driver checked his rear view. There were two more. One of them had a knife. The third was cradling a submachine gun in his hands like it were a baby.

I’ll talk to them, the Queen said.

She opened the door, rupturing the bubble of warm air inside the car. It had rained all last night, the air was still damp. The man with the machine gun pointed it and shouted. She got out, slowly and carefully. She’d had her hip replaced a year ago.

They saw who she was and the threat vanished. The driver read the lips of the big man in the green shirt.

Queen!

His mouth was huge even in proportion to his body.

The three men surrounded the Queen as she braced herself against the side of the car. They talked, they laughed. The three men kept their weapons politely behind their backs, except for the man with the machine gun, who at one point briefly showed it off like it were a diploma. She shook their hands and got back into the car. The pirates waved as they were left behind.

The people love me, the Queen said. I’m always telling you.

She was silent for a few minutes, then she got going again.

It bothered me when they said that. The fact that the driver hadn’t heard any of their conversation had nothing to do with anything. Things do change, she said. Things change quite a bit.

They continued to make their way west, closer to the ground now. For each building that was still standing, two more had collapsed. There were people around, but not very many of them. There was an area around the edge of the city, closer to the perimeter, where it made sense to go if you were selling drugs, or wanted to have an adventure, or needed to meet someone in a place you would not be witnessed or overheard, but this wasn't it. Every three or four years there'd be a movie about someone trying to run a school or a hospital out here. It was the kind of thing an actor would win an award for.

The Queen was still going strong. At a certain point the driver stopped listening. She was talking to herself now.

She knew he wasn’t paying attention. She was glad, it helped her think.

"It’s hard for me to remember why people thought they needed so many places to shop. It’s perverse. It’s like one of those rock gardens monks use to meditate. You could spend a whole lifetime moving from one clean, well-lit, safe place to another. You’d never run out, you could just keep going.

I wonder if I could have ever gone that way. Some rich man’s wife. We used to talk about that sometimes, marrying whoever was on the magazine cover that month and just being lazy. It would be a hard way to live after a while, actually. You’d have to have some kind of zen thing going on, so being in the cage wouldn’t bother you.

She stopped talking. She didn’t stop, she was stopped. A screeching buzz shook her eardrums. Any time someone waited a moment too long to open a door, that noise come screaming out of nowhere, rattling around inside her mind. It was a memory, but it wouldn't be right to say it wasn't real. It had been giving her headaches her entire adult life.

She took a step backwards and retraced her thoughts. So being in the cage wouldn’t bother you. That was it. That was it right there.

They passed the event horizon- she could still feel it, something within her popping into place. When you were inside the fence that marked the boundary of the prison, the world past the boundary disappeared and was replaced with something else, a flat prairie nothing stretching out in every direction. She had tried many times over the course of her long life to explain it. Part of it was psychological, and part of it was just a trick of the topography, the way the trees cut off certain lines of sight and directed you towards others. If they’d built the place on a hill instead of a valley it might be completely different.

But it went beyond any one thing, any combination of things. The moment you went inside, the world outside changed. Like your reflection in the mirror laughing at you as soon as you turned your back.

Stop, she said. The driver parked the car on the side of the road and she got out. She approached the prison. The fence was long gone but there were metal posts still sticking out of the ground; walking between them was pleasantly blasphemous, and she gave herself a smile as she entered the courtyard. There were kids playing soccer- another violation, she’d spent so much time walking from one place to another in double-file that the straight lines leading from one door to the other were almost visible, like train tracks. Adults were watching them from the buildings. Somebody was barbecuing something, she could smell the charcoal burning. 

All eyes were on her as she moved to the center. Not a glimmer of recognition from anyone. They didn’t know who she was, or they didn’t care. They wore rags, half-shirts of different sizes sewed together. No weapons that she could see. Impossible that they didn’t have them- they were hidden, then. They had an arrangement. A whistle or a shout, that’s all it would take.

When the Queen had been a very small child, she’d been afraid of the dark. When the lights went out and she got scared she would imagine that she was surrounded by a halo of white light, a shield that nothing could pass through. When she first started doing it she’d been uncertain if the light was real or something she was making up. As she grew up she came to understand that the light was just something she imagined, that it had no objective reality.

She knew better these days. The light was as real as the wind or the rain or the sky. It had kept her safe too many times to be anything else.

She walked into the center of the courtyard, through the children’s soccer game. They stopped playing. She looked down at one of the younger ones and smiled warmly. The kid smiled back.

She turned around. She expanded her energy, filtered out distractions. She removed the people around her from the scene. She replaced the broken windows, repainted the walls, put the fences back up.

She remembered. She remembered carefully.

1

Not counting the garage and a utility shed, Millersville was six buildings, a big one and five small ones orbiting around it that made a semicircle facing away from the road. It was contained by an empty field of green grass, a tall fence with long spools of barbed wire that surrounded the better part of the main building, and a shorter, completely unfortified fence that surrounded the field and the other buildings.

The main building was the entrance to the prison. It was where the visiting area was. It also contained the school, the library, the pharmacy, the staff break room, the offices of the prison administration, the kitchen, and the dining hall. The central hallway of the main building was a snake, a single curving path with no forks that were not also locked doors or forbidden areas or both. The walls were made of concrete blocks and painted white and blue, white on the top half and blue on the bottom. The floor was white tile. It shined every morning, every day somebody got up at five o’clock to clean it. It was a job you wanted, a reward for being trustworthy.

It was two o’clock, third shift, and it was dark outside. The lights in the main hallway were on, there were two men with shaved heads in the secured room near the entrance, looking at the monitors connected to the security cameras. All the other lights were out, all the other doors were closed.

The five cottages, the small buildings surrounding the big one, were where the girls had their cells. Cottage E was used for storage, nobody lived there anymore. Cottage A, cottage B, and cottage C were all split into two wings. A had both drug wings, Drug 1 and Drug 2, B had the psych wing (which was officially called something else, but everybody called it the psych wing) and intake, which was where you went for three weeks when you first got here. C had confinement and C wing. You went to C wing when you were twenty, or sometimes younger if you had a sentence. And cottage D was baby cottage, where you went if you were pregnant or had a kid.

E wing had a fence around the back, a little self-contained yard with a couple of picnic tables in it, so sometimes when there was no school they took you back there. Other then that, you only saw the front part of each cottage. Each of the five buildings was, when you stopped to think about it, a yellow box, but in practice you didn’t stop to think about it. Your vision narrowed; you saw the particular door you walked out of and back into. The others became rumors, things you only heard about.

Shelly and Nicole shared a room in Drug 1. It was two o’clock in the morning. They were both awake and weren’t supposed to be, but neither of them was worried about getting caught, third shift was Warski this month and Warski wasn’t going to do shit except read his book. Nicole was laying in bed with her eyes half-closed. Shelly was sitting on the floor in the lotus position. She’d used rolled up toilet paper to make a circle on the ground around her that just touched the edge of the wall. A jump and a sweep of her hand and the whole thing could be down her pants leg and she could be back in bed, eyes closed, perfectly legal.

She breathed in and breathed out, concentrated. She whispered. She didn’t want to wake up Nicole. Nicole and Shelly didn’t like each other, but they stayed out of each other’s business and made good roommates. They had a single shelf to share, which they’d split neatly between the two of them, Nikki on the right and Shelly on the left. They each had three paperback books, which was the most you could have. Shelly had a bag of black jelly beans and a picture of her mom in a wooden frame small enough to hold in her hand. Nikki had a radio with a clear plastic case that she’d saved her money to buy.

There was a particular poem that was the right poem to say, Shelly had read it in a book a long time ago, but she only remembered parts of it so she used one she’d made up herself instead. She tried to say it the same way every time; it might be easier if she wrote it down, but she didn’t want to do that, it would feel like cheating.

King and queen, she whispered. Lord and lady. Her mind went blank for a moment, but only a moment, she picked it up again. "Sun and moon. I pray to the fire and the water, the earth and the air.

I pray for power. I pray for grace. I pray for good fortune.

She had a white candle hidden in her bra, she’d gone to church for the first and only time so that she'd have the opportunity to steal it. She was using it as a separation candle, a way to mark the end of one thing and the beginning of another. A real separation candle would be red, but she had no way to dye it short of cutting herself, which she really didn’t want to do. Shelly had never cut herself on purpose, never been tempted. Whatever the messed up thing was that had left some of the others with lines and cigarette burns covering their arms, it was something she’d been spared, and she didn’t want to tempt fate, not now. A white candle would be fine.

I pray... She’d thought about this part a lot. ...for my life and my time. Freedom would sound corny. That I get the fuck out of here tomorrow would’ve been better, but it didn’t have the right sound. She was serious about what she was doing, she didn’t want to give anybody any reason to think otherwise. Even if her roommate was the only one who could hear her.

She tried to think of something else to say but came up empty. Nothing wrong with keeping it short.

Blessed be. She pretended to blow out the candle and took a deep breath, smiling. She felt stupid, kind of drunk. For a minute she didn’t care about what was going to happen tomorrow. It just wasn’t important.

She got back into bed.

When I get out of here I’m going to own a tattoo parlor, Shellie said. Or a coffee shop or something.

Nicole rolled over. You don’t even know if you’re getting out yet.

I don’t know if I’m getting out tomorrow. If it’s not tomorrow it’ll be some other time.

You don’t have any money.

Not yet.

Where are you going to get it?

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go back to working at the club.

"Your PO isn’t