Running Wild Novella Anthology Volume 3 Book 1

By Christa M. Miller, Lisa Diane Kastner and Talia Tucker

The Astral Plane by Kate AldridgeTemplate for a Story of Food, Sex & (Improbable) Restitution by Joe DaviesThe Twenty and One Nights by Barbara de la CuestaThe Mountain by Taylor DentonThe Not-So-Chinese Wedding by Dorie LaRueThe Patriot by Timothy P LynchIt May Have Been a Dream, It Might Just Be My Life by Kate MacdonaldResurrection Blues and Queen of Sheba by Christa M MillerSweet Gulf by C. R. ResetaritsI Was a Teenage Popstar and I Lost It All by Sean M SmithBroken Soul to Broken Soul by Audra SuppleeAll Right, Be Safe by Talia TuckerWhat the Blood Tells You to Be by Kami D WesthoffTriggerfish 1-2 by Ben B WhiteThirty Seconds to Kill by Peter A Wright

• Language: English
• Publisher: Running Wild Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781947041394

Book preview

978-1-947041-39-4

It May Have Been a Dream, It May Just Be My Life

By Kate Macdonald

We were renting an art studio

In the north end

We had been partying

We had been in the streets

And people were hanging off the balconies

Like in the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras

We had been looking for a door.

It wasn’t what we had expected but we found it.

It was sunny

But somehow it was

After the awards

You sold a gram of coke to Ky/y-a/h~h

I told you to be more undercover

You laughed

You grabbed the cash

We both drank

We were in a kitchen

At a bar

We saw him coming up the street

Or felt him?

And immediately everyone we knew was scared

Everyone tried to pile out of the back door

I tried to stay calm

I tried to cover for everyone

We were afraid he might kill us

That seemed like the probable answer

He was a coke filled angry mother fucker

Racist mother fucker

But we had found a tunnel.

And everyone had managed to sneak out the back and pile into a car

A station wagon

A beige station wagon

I was gathering garbage

Hoping he wouldn’t see me

Or make eye contact with me

Everyone else was out

He had a son

Close to 8 maybe

He was cooking for him

His kid looked through me while I was frantically trying to clean up

You came back

I was on my way out.

He stopped and demanded we needed to give him $200 bucks by tomorrow

You laughed

I said we would have it

I was so scared

I thought I wasn’t going to be able to leave

We ran out the back

I asked to get dropped off at the house

Everyone was hollering in the car on the way down the street

Like celebrating

Like we had won

Like we had beat him

I needed to be inside

You wanted to stay out

But when I went upstairs you were there

You were in bed

Wearing your pink sweater

We had tried to kiss

Tried. I don’t know why we couldn’t actually.

But we couldn’t

Then I knew it was time.

I forced myself to wake

I’m missing details

I’m missing some of the feelings

But the feeling of trying to clean in order to stay alive lives

It was 2:58 when I opened my eyes

3:00 hit

It’s 3:30 now

And I’m too scared to sleep

I don’t want to feel like that again

I don’t want to feel like I have to scramble for my life

I hope I can fall back asleep

I hope I can fall back asleep

But for now I’m making a drink.

Love from the girl tryna fight chasing the high

Love from girl who chose sleep and a clean nose

Love from the girl who doesn’t know that decision left her better

Love from the girl who is haunted by the sirens

Love from the girl

Truth be told I’m tired

Love from the girl

Truth be told I’m fucking tired

Love from that girl

Love from me

The Queen of Sheba

By Christa Miller

One

The first time I realize that anyone is, like me, immune to empathy inhibitor drugs, we’re at work. Our job — not that you can call it a job, because we don’t get paid for it — is to cook and serve three meals a day for the Transport Security troop that lives in this barracks, which is a former hotel that stands just off the I-95 interstate.

It’s early December in New England, so the kitchen isn’t as stifling hot as it could be. Even so, near the end of our usual sixteen-hour shift, we’re wiped. We’ve been here since five in the morning, as always because early starts and long days build character in those of us who are sentenced to work off our debts to society, and we still have cleanup to get through.

I’m headed to collect an empty chafing dish from the serving area. For six months I’ve been part of the contract labor crew that works this all-male barracks, and by now, the eyes and comments and, yes, the thoughts and intent that crawl into my brain and lurk there like greasy shadows have become just so much background noise. They’re all the same, so it doesn’t matter who said or thought it, so I hardly look back anymore.

This time is different. This time I sense curiosity, so I can’t help but glance up. Exhaustion has never let any of us drop our guard before, but everything has a first time, as the saying goes.

The white woman on the other side of the serving table is a shock. She watches me while she pulls a piece of chicken from the chafing dish beside the rice, and our eyes lock. I can feel how wide open and uninhibited her emotions are, and I can feel her feel me, too. She shares my exhaustion in a way no one has since I can’t even remember when.

We’re not supposed to have any contact with anyone and I have no idea what the consequences would be if I were caught, so I slam my defenses down tight: I envision a literal glass wall that divides us and cuts the connection. I don’t think the other woman realizes what’s happened, because she takes a step backwards, as if she didn’t expect eye contact to be so blank.

That’s fair. Eye contact wasn’t empty for a long time, and it isn’t supposed to be, but it’s the only way to survive these days. Especially when you’re sentenced to a lifetime of labor.

Don’t let them spook you, I hear the Transport Security officer beside her say. I don’t stick around to find out what else is on his mind. I scurry back through the swinging door and I can feel his eyes on me, speculative, and not in the usual way. Shit. Shitshitshit. I’ve managed to stay out of solitary since I arrived at the labor facility, and I’d prefer to continue.

That’s more like it, I swear I hear someone think — that cop maybe — but it’s the last thing I let into my mind because it makes me shake, the thought that I’ve betrayed my biggest secret.

On my way back into the kitchen I pass Reginique, who carries a fresh chafing dish. The steam rises off the chicken and beads on her dark bronze skin, and she keeps her tawny, near-golden eyes level as she passes me on her way out the door. At the same time I hear her say as if she speaks the words into my ear:

Girl. Get your shit together.

Quiet and powerful, just like she is. I only just manage to avoid reacting to her. I have dishes to wash, and I get my shit together by focusing on that routine. I stay focused until nightfall, when it’s time to get on the bus to return to the labor facility. By then the effort of keeping my guard up has compounded my physical exhaustion, and even though the bus seats are hard and the wheels and engine are a roar on the road, I fall asleep on the bus headed back to the facility.

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Two

(trigger warning: sexual abuse)

My first thought when I wake the next morning: of course I already knew Reginique was immune. The signs were there. I just didn’t want to see them.

The inhibitors that all the women in the facility are forced to take, day after day, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, means our emotions are — not always, but often — muted. In contrast to the flood of curiosity I experienced yesterday from the other, uninhibited woman, around those who are on inhibitors I might feel something, but I won’t be able to tell who it belongs to, and it doesn’t last.

I also don’t chase emotions. This is partly because the thought of my own immunity makes me think about all the things I did to overcome it. And that means I think about the wigs my friends and I purchased, which was right before everything fell apart.

It’s also because I’ve never had a reason to notice anyone else’s immunity. It’s not just that empathy is illegal, laborers aren’t supposed to have contact, and work keeps us all too busy anyway. It’s also because I have no way and no need to track time. What I mean is, going by the passage of time and the seasons, I’d say I’ve served about one year of my life sentence. When your entire existence is bound up in working off debt and you can’t have contact with other humans — well, then there’s not much point to reach out or test.

That’s why I didn’t notice Reginique’s immunity right away. I also suspect she herself has a way to hide it. Even though she’s been at this facility for I don’t know how long, even though she walks with a limp and is pudgy and middle-aged — sometimes I look at her and think back to a photograph I once saw, of a young black woman regally facing down a horde of cops in the street. Just as her name suggests, there’s something queen-like about her, so that even past her physical prime, Reginique seems younger and stronger and more powerful. Like she commands an invisible army filled with loyal subjects.

It’s that power that hides the immunity that might have unknown consequences. And why it’s in her quiet moments, the ones where she thinks no one sees her, that her immunity registers with me.

The one that stands out in my mind happened about a month after I arrived at the facility, a former office building now outfitted with cots in the cubicles and little else. This group of new intakes had shown up on the regular weekly schedule, and because I’d worked out that I was immune to whatever made the inhibitors work, the weekly intakes have been — for me — almost as much of a bitch as PMS.

That’s because the supervisors don’t want the new intakes to harbor any illusions about the new reality of our lives. The abuse starts as soon as you set foot on facility property. The female supervisors grope and speak to you as if they were men. They peep on you in the shower and make comments about your body. They conduct cavity searches and sometimes, depending on the supervisor, they even stimulate you. For an immune like me, it’s this toxic mess of shock and disgust and humiliation, and sometimes, trauma too.

This one group of new laborers brought in an intake named Chantrelle, a pregnant woman whose horror and shame nearly made me curl up in a ball. She cried so hard during her cavity search that even the supervisors had the sense to look embarrassed.

Which Reginique used as leverage. Don’t you remember your first gynecological exam? she scolded one of the supervisors, Quarles, a stocky white woman with short red-tinted hair, who honest-to-goodness shuffled aside — a blatant violation of the rules — so that Reginique could comfort Chantrelle.

We soon learned, not because Reginique asked or because she spread what Chantrelle told her, but because Chantrelle screamed the words out: she’d been sexually abused where she last worked. She was a maid, that’s all she was hired for, she was promised there wouldn’t be anyone home while she worked, except there was, and he raped her all the time. Then when he got her pregnant and it made her work substandard, he had her taken away.

Quarles’ exam wasn’t the only thing that triggered Chantrelle. What will they do with me when I fuck up my work here? she sobbed.

None of us had ever thought of it like that. I hadn’t had the time, and I guess the other laborers were too busy to think who got to determine whether we’ve done a good job, what would happen if we lost a contract to a competing labor facility.

Quarles’ allowance of space for Reginique to congregate meant that Reginique took just a minute or so to whisper to Chantrelle, who kept sobbing and shaking as if she didn’t hear. Then again, if I’d been lured to a home under false pretenses like that, I probably wouldn’t be able to take anyone else at their word, either.

Despair gripped me throughout the rest of the day, no matter how hard I tried to focus on other things. I stayed wired through the night, and in the wee hours it turned to fear and panic. Perhaps not coincidentally in conjunction with cries and screams: Chantrelle had gone into labor.

Staff acted pretty quickly. The drones must have alerted them. They came in, got Chantrelle, and left, though not by ambulance. The panic and fear continued throughout the night, into the wee hours, when it abruptly stopped. By then I had a massive headache, and sleep didn’t come in the silence.

Chantrelle didn’t return. The supervisors didn’t tell us what happened. They never do. But in the shower line the next morning, rumor was that she had bled too much, that she and her baby had died in childbirth.

It would make sense. That would be why the despair I’d sensed had ended so quickly.

As if I hadn’t carried enough guilt for the death of one black girl, now I could add guilt over my own relief at the death of another. Like I should’ve helped her in some way. My limbs shook throughout the walk down the corridors of our building to the stairs that lead to the bus. Prob’ly best, murmured one woman behind me. She don’t got to see that babe sold to adoption.

At the time I was too wrapped up in myself to think it was anyone but me overcome by what had happened, probably because I was still processing my own hand in that other death only a few months earlier. So even when I turned my face to look across the bus aisle at Reginique, slumped in the window seat on the other side as tears coursed down her cheeks, I thought she only mirrored what I felt: Chantrelle’s death hurt.

Goddamn straight up it hurts, I thought then, the voice not mine but hers inside my head.

At one time I would have recognized the empathy for what it was. This time, I thought simply that I’d spent too much time around her; that she’d influenced my thoughts. Maybe that was for the best. If I’d recognized it, I might have reported her like a good citizen. Then again, maybe my subconscious didn’t want yet a third reason to feel guilty.

––––––––

Three

I don’t approach Reginique after all this occurs to me. Not during morning shower line, and not on the bus, which is our time to eat our breakfast Nutraloaf anyway. Instead I use the time to think: if Reginique and I are both immune, but we’ve both kept our defenses up for the past year that we’ve known each other — give or take those moments where we didn’t recognize one another’s abilities — then what was it that made me drop my guard? And how did she recognize how close I’d come to losing it?

Probably she’d seen my reaction on sight, though if asked, I would’ve said the heat of the kitchen made me feel dizzy. The first part of the question is more worrisome. Is there such a thing as defense fatigue? What if it happens today and I can’t control it?

It doesn’t happen today. We also don’t see the other woman again. By afternoon I have to think that she was somehow the trigger. But I’ve lived exclusively with other women for a year. Why would one make me drop my defenses like that?

We don’t speak much while we’re at work, not even for occupational purposes, which are allowed under the no congregating rule. We’re too busy, and two supervisors, Quarles and a young blonde woman named Bisson, are assigned to oversee and overhear us. Reginique speaks into my head, anyway, while we chop carrots and onions for pot roast dinner. Women in abusive relationships like that remind us of ourselves, so it’s easier to empathize with them. Don’t even look at them. Focus on your work, and you won’t get triggered.

What are you even talking about? I think in response, and I can’t tell whether she heard me because she’s already gone on to stir vegetables into a pot to saute, and she doesn’t respond. I’m left to consider what I saw yesterday: the other woman, not much older than a teenager, together with that cop. What was it about them that could have reminded me of her? My husband had been only a year older than me. And never a hoverer, possessive like that cop had been with that girl.

Then again, he wasn’t who I’d noticed. I’d focused on her, how naively open she seemed to be. Like I’d been when I first met Tom. How he’d ultimately used that to mold me into his version of the perfect wife. One who wouldn’t question his perversions. Who would join in once they were legalized.

I don’t notice the cut on my finger until Reginique rushes up beside me with a towel and a strainer. The towel, she wraps around my hand. The strainer is for the vegetables. She scoops them in and brings it to the sink, where she gives them a thorough rinse under hot water before they, too, go into a pan to saute. I reach for a wooden spoon to stir them.

Nothin’ doin’, Reginique says, not before we look at that finger.

Quarles wanders over, hands on her hips. No congregating, she says in her deadpan.

I swear if I started to bleed out, she’d comment on the need to call medics in exactly the same tone. I unwrap the towel, show her the blood that wells from my finger.

No reason to make a fuss. Slap a bandaid on it and get back to work.

I don’t know where the bandaids are, and I stand there stupidly for a few seconds until Reginique speaks up: We don’t know where the first aid kit is.

Quarles huffs a sigh, fishes around in her cargo pants pocket and pulls one out. Do you need me to unwrap it for you, too, sweetie? she snarks in a high falsetto.

I shake my head slowly. A year ago, when part of our HOA dues went to pay her salary, she would never have mocked me like this. Honestly, the tables probably would’ve been turned: I would’ve mocked her for being unable to find any better work than the women’s labor facility. She needs someone to feel superior over, so she stands there, watching me unwrap the bandaid and carefully layer it over my cut. I don’t look at her as I rise and make my way back to my pan, where my vegetables have just started to burn. I give them a stir. Then I grab the slab of beef to sear in the pan with them. Reginique and I don’t look at each other again for the entire rest of the workday.

Four

There’s another worry on my mind, one I don’t allow to come any closer than the briefest of thoughts in the back of my head. It persists throughout the following weeks and months, not a thought so much as a fear that I’m barely willing to put into words: what if Reginique knows why I’m here?

I deliberately avoid thinking about the old days while I’m awake, because it’s a chain reaction: one memory leads to the next, I get caught up in them, and then, because life doesn’t go on hold, come consequences like the stinging cut on my finger.

At night, though, I can’t control my mind so carefully. It compensates by giving me nightmares.

Sometimes I’m on Hampton Beach, back when there still was a beach before the sea level rose, before we voted in a government that banned empathy. I’m home from Dartmouth for summer break, and I’m laughing on the sand with my friends, except that in the dream my empathy is in overdrive and I know they aren’t my friends. The laughter feels forced, like we all have to keep up the pretense or else we’ll face some horrible consequence.

Other times I’m back in my backyard with my neighbors, Liza and Joni, half drunk on sangria or daiquiris or whatever fruity sweet beverage we’d concocted, the kids asleep, the husbands out of our way. There are no fireflies in New Hampshire, but they dance on the lawn as we laugh. In those dreams, it’s Brooke-Liza-Joni, best friends forever, and the love we have for each other flows as freely as the beverages.

Occasionally I’m back at Dartmouth, meeting Tom in Accounting class. In real life we didn’t get married until six years after we graduated, but in my dream we’re already married. I always wake up when he shoots himself, not on our front lawn like in real life, but on the broad grassy green in front of Baker-Berry Library, as if the knowledge he earned there was too much of a burden to bear.

Rarely, but the worst nightmares of all, are when I relive what we did that got me here. Those, it feels like the first time all over again as I order the mixed-race girl to the marina. Take her out on our boat, booze her up. Tie her up, hold her down. Help Tom roll her body into the tidal water of the marshes.

I haven’t been able to determine what triggers those dreams, if anything at all. They aren’t fuzzy like the other ones, they don’t splice together memories from different times or make up details like the fireflies. They make me relive that night as if I were back there again, every tiny little detail, even smells and sounds. It’s like my subconscious wants to convince me I’m a bad person when I know I’m not. It was an accident, I wake up thinking, that’s not who I was, or who I am.

Before I realized that Reginique’s immune to inhibitors too, I would wake disoriented. My sweat would soak the thin canvas cot, chilling me. I’d blink in the facility’s stillness, listen for the whir of supervisory drones and stay still so they couldn’t flag me as awake after hours. I’d come to my senses slowly, eventually grateful for the inhibitor drugs everyone here is forced to take. Not because they work on me, but because they block my dreams from entering anyone else’s head.

Now I don’t even have that comfort. The night I cut my hand in the kitchen, that dream, the one about what I did, came to me for the first time in months. As soon as I woke I imagined the judgmental look on Reginique’s face, the one I catch sometimes in the showers or as we line up for transport. Before, but especially after my nightmare, that look has often made me wonder if she can see my dreams or sense how I feel when I have them. If she can, I’ve never been able to pin her down because she doesn’t treat me that much differently from the other white woman. That is to say, she doesn’t have much to do with us at all.

Take our names. We’re all supposed to refer to one another by our numbers, but Reginique calls everyone by names she gives us, which somehow stick, even with supervisors. Most times she uses people’s birth names, a way to help the other black laborers to retain their humanity. For women with mixed Black-Latina heritage, she’s careful to avoid Hispanic-sounding names, which would flag a deportation case to supervisors. Other times, she assigns names, like mine, that she uses whenever she has to get someone’s attention. Not prison nicknames, nothing like where we’re from or what we look like or how we speak, but actual given names that I guess are supposed to reflect who she thinks we are.

My real name is Brooke, but Becca is the name Reginique gave me, I guess to differentiate me from Becky, the other white girl, who may or may not actually be a Becky but has never told us otherwise. Unlike me, she uses her voice. Me, I stay silent because I don’t know where my mouth will take me and don’t want to go there regardless. Becca is another layer over who I really am.

The girl Tom and I killed had a name. I know because her hair somehow ended up in the wig that went on my friend Joni’s head, and Joni identified as her — Ayana — while she wore it. I don’t remember enough from that time to know details. I was too out of my head with my own issues. I don’t even remember my arrest. One minute I was watching Tom blow his head off; the next, I was in this cubicle, being handed a pile of blankets and clothes. I had to piece it all together later on, work out for myself that other people’s emotions completely overrode my own and my friends’. Too bad for me, the girl we ordered, and Joni, that whoever’s hair was used to make my wig was a psychopathic child abuser. The irony: I bought the damn wig to dampen my empathy. Because I heard the New Moon wigs were more powerful than standard inhibitors. Because I was tired of emotions that weren’t mine clattering around in my head.

The wig was more powerful, all right. Though sometimes I think that maybe like alcohol, the wig awakened some trauma deep inside me that I didn’t know I had.

So yeah. I don’t know whether Reginique already knows all this about me; whether she found out when I got here, or the night I cut my finger, or if it leaks out in increments over time. If she does know, the most she’s ever shown it are those expressions I catch.

Besides, if she knows that much about me, she knows the reason too: there would have been no accident without the damn wig. And yet, if she ever confronts me, I’ll say what exactly? How stupid does it sound to say the wig made me do it?

Not that it makes any difference. The debt to society that I’m sentenced to work off is destruction of company property. It’s treated equally along with all the other debts, but I know it’s murder, and Reginique would think of it that way too. Maybe I am exactly the kind of person my worst dream says I am, and it’s only a matter of time before she tells the other black laborers that I killed one of their own. She’s just waiting for the right time to bring it up, and at that point, I’ll deserve whatever justice these women choose to mete out.

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Five

While I alternately worry about and resign myself to whatever Reginique does or doesn’t know about me or whether she intends to do anything about it, winter gradually begins to turn to spring. That’s when a second thing happens that means more than I initially give it credit for.

Quarles, the supervisor, has shown up for work later and later each day. One morning she shows up so late that Bisson is about to leave without her. When Quarles does appear, she’s out of breath and near tears. Her anxiety is so intense that she doesn’t need to put it into words for me to parse: she’s terrified that she’ll be out of a job and will have to join us on the line.

There’s another fear underneath it, but her inhibitors keep it from me. Meanwhile, Bisson accosts her so that none of us can hear anything except snatches of dialogue: something about Quarles’s mother and care. The confusion and fear and sadness that rolls off Quarles actually makes me want to give her a hug. I think back to the day I cut my finger. No wonder she treated that cut like it was nothing; if she cares for a sick mother, she must be completely burned out.

Which probably makes it best to stay on her good side today.

Unfortunately for any of us, it doesn’t appear that caregiver responsibilities will let up anytime soon. Not half an hour into our breakfast shift, one of the newer laborers, a black woman named Kendra who came to us only about a month ago, starts to cry.

It would be both easy and cruel to assume she’s upset because we cook the good stuff for others while we only get Nutraloaf. But the month Kendra’s been here is long enough to work out that the system’s reliance on Nutraloaf is, at best, largely a head game. You just have to learn to look at the right way: let the smells of pot roast or roast turkey or spaghetti bolognese linger in your nostrils for long enough, and the Nutraloaf takes on the characteristics of whatever you’ve made. At least, I think it does.

However, that’s the least of Kendra’s problems. She has celiac disease, and Nutraloaf is about one-third wheat. Because it gives her constipation, not diarrhea, she isn’t excused from work details. Instead she suffers through them, in constant pain.

Unlike some empaths, I can’t feel other people’s physical pain. In a case like Kendra’s, though, I feel all the emotion that goes with physical pain: the frustration and humiliation and anger that go along with having an unColmanative body. By the time Kendra starts to cry, I want to either hug her or hit her.

It’s not ugly-crying, not real sobs. Silent tears run down her face so that she has to swipe at them with her sleeve, and because she’s nowhere near onions, it’s easy for the others to figure out she’s upset. They nudge each other in a round-robin, use their chins to indicate what’s going on. It takes awhile — because the supervisors’ reaction to even that kind of communication is a strong scolding, and maybe, the mood Quarles is in, a removal of privileges — to make its way around the kitchen to Reginique.

When Reginique sees it she drops her immediate task and makes her way to Kendra’s side. In a few seconds they sink to the floor, Kendra tight in Reginique’s arms.

I don’t look at them. Reginique’s concern for my finger last winter notwithstanding, it’s been a long, long time, maybe even never, since I’ve had anyone to love me unconditionally like that.

One of the other laborers, Zinnia, covers for Reginique. She scootches over so that she’s between two workstations and makes it look like she’s using Reginique’s cutting board to hold the sliced fruit she’s responsible for.

Kendra wasn’t cutting, though. She’s supposed to pan-fry potatoes, so no one can easily cover for her. My job is to scramble eggs, also not easy to cover. I mean, if Kendra’s station were beside mine, I could easily go back and forth between my pans and hers. But I can’t reach over, nor can I pull her pan to my side. Anyway, diverting my attention could risk overdone eggs. I stay right where I am while Reginique comforts Kendra. The kitchen goes about its business and I have to admit Reginique’s good: you can barely tell there are two people out of their line.

Until the orderly, Jesika, starts to round up food to deliver to the waiting Transport Security staff.

These potatoes burned, she howls. Who responsible for this station? She looks around. Her anger gets my blood up as well. She’s responsible for food quality, and if it’s shit, she ends up in solitary for a week and loses her orderly status, which includes her privileges.

When she spots Reginique and Kendra on the floor she doubles down. SuuuuuPEEEER!

Just for a moment I feel guilty that I didn’t help with the potatoes. Overdone eggs seems like less of a big deal than burned potatoes.

Then I shove it aside. I have nothing to feel guilty about. We’re supposed to go about our business regardless of disruption, so I shovel my eggs into the waiting chafing dish, then follow other laborers as we carry the food — eggs, bacon, sausage, cut fruit, oatmeal — out to where it belongs.

The only thing missing are the potatoes.

We head back to the kitchen to begin cleanup. Quarles stands over Reginique, fists balled on her hips as if supervising a toddler who doesn’t want to get dressed. She just, I can feel, wants someone to cooperate with her for a change.

When we all troop into her space, Quarles starts, like she realizes she needs to take some kind of action. She puts hands on the still-weeping Kendra to pull her away. Reginique doesn’t resist, but she doesn’t let Quarles rough Kendra up either. She stands on her own, helps Kendra to her feet before Quarles shoves them apart.

Solitary for you both, the supervisor snarls. Three days.

Kendra got a migraine, one of the other women — I can’t tell who — shouts.

Quarles spins around. Who said that?

No one owns up, but I hear another woman nearby mutter, Maybe if you fed her something besides what makes her sick.

Quarles doesn’t respond, so she must not have heard. Which is good, because for all of us to end up in solitary wouldn’t take much. Instead she glares at us all before she says, Back to work. All of you, with a meaningful glance at Kendra. She shakes her arm and all Kendra can do is keep her eyes focused on the floor.

Thank God I don’t have celiac.

Reginique returns to her fruit-cutting station and I feel her eyes and her disapproval settle on me. What was I supposed to do? I retort to her, can’t help myself, but she doesn’t answer. Somehow, that’s worse than the thought of solitary.

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Six

These days solitary is less a place to be, like in a traditional prison, and more a state of being. A laborer in solitary still has to work, so she still rides the bus, still takes part in the kitchen assembly line. At night she does get physically separated from the rest of the laborers, locked away in what used to be a broom closet on a different floor entirely. And there’s the removal of what are called privileges: the second serving of Nutraloaf for the day, plus access to the market for toiletries, so you’re screwed if you have your period.

Even those are only outward manifestations, a way to enforce the real policy: total ostracization. Besides the silent treatment from other laborers, you get it from the supervisors, too. You become invisible.

Nearly a year I’ve been here, and never seen it in action for more than a week. That’s supposed to be enough of a deterrent, and generally, it works. Women who go through it are visibly relieved when they return to normal life. No congregating suddenly seems generous. I guess that’s why no one’s ever tried the kind of mutiny that might get all of us consigned to solitary.

This is the first time Reginique has gotten solitary that I’ve seen. For the crime of comforting someone else, ostracizing her seems particularly cruel. But that’s the nature of our society today. When you’ve already criminalized empathy, the outward displays of it are easy to control.

Kendra barely holds it together for the rest of the day. When Quarles and Bisson shepherd her and Reginique off to their broom closets at the end of the day, I can’t help but wonder whether at last Kendra will get the medical attention she needs, if it means impact to her work performance. Probably not: she did, after all, work today, even if she was slower.

That evening after count, we line up as we always do for the market. The market is two women, a light-skinned, masculine-looking black woman named Jaq, and Becky, the other white woman, who are given the privilege to coordinate supplies we need: tampons or pads, a little extra toilet paper, even a little candy sometimes if they have it.

We don’t know where the supplies come from, nor why Jaq and Becky were chosen for their entrepreneurial spirit. All we know is two things: the no congregating rule is relaxed for this hour or so. No one talks much anyway, except Becky, who chatters enough for all of us. The other thing we know is, the good behavior credits we’re given aren’t enough to make many meaningful purchases. They’re completely subjective, they can be taken away as well as not be awarded, and that usually means you end up saving for not very much at all.

Today I have enough credits to buy two tampons. Becky scans the RFID chip in my arm and Jaq hands over the two little tubes.

With something extra. Its hard edges poke my palm. I let my arm hang loose as I step back into line, but my heart hammers and I can’t look at Jaq. It’s a relief to return to the cubicles.

I’m supposed to get ready for sleep, so I stick to my routine until I have the chance to take a closer look at what Jaq gave me.

Shockingly, it’s a pill pack. Painkillers is my first thought, but only staff hands out any kind of drug, which includes our inhibitor rations. Laborers would never be trusted with drugs, no matter how entrepreneurial. No, this can only be an illegal pack.

My first thought is Becky’s medication somehow ended up with me. One of the things she’s made sure we all know is that she gets chronic yeast infections that made her unfit for sex labor because of the smell — if there’s one unforgivable sin in the sex trade, it’s a smelly hooha; unlike with disabilities, no one has a smelly cunt fetish — and Jaq offered to get her meds if Becky agreed to help her run the market.

For Jaq to fuck with her meds could mean a bid to get revenge for some infraction, real or perceived. I know, because it happened to me when I first arrived. I worked for Jaq for a month, doing pretty much what Becky does now, until two things happened: one, I discovered that even the extra powerful inhibitors Jaq had found for me didn’t work. And two, she got shook down after a supervisor discovered contraband in another white laborer’s cubicle and Jaq thought it was some white conspiracy against her. That she agreed to get another white girl to work for her amazed me, though at the time I thought it had more to do with Becky’s age and innocence. If she’s just paranoid, though, she might mess with Becky’s meds especially if she couldn’t get anyone else to help her.

The other possibility is that these are for me. Some kind of extra strength inhibitor I didn’t know existed. That would mean Jaq knows I still need them, and if that’s the case, what does she know, and why would she help me? Plus, who else knows? I was never clear on how she got what she got, but she has to have someone who can help her get stuff. My hands shake as I turn the pack over, looking for a drug name or some other clue.

For Kendra is scrawled on the foil. I rub my thumb across the letters so that they smear. Kendra doesn’t need any more trouble. But there’s no other information on the foil, so I can’t tell what kind of drug this is: something to help her with her celiac, or something else entirely. Obviously, since she’s in solitary, she can’t receive it directly. But why was I chosen to get it to her?

And where the hell do I hide it until I can give it to her? In my underwear is obvious, but surprise inspections happen all the time with no rhyme or reason. It would be a massive risk, and I don’t even know what the penalty would be. One time another black laborer, Tyeshia, got busted for a contraband recording device. She was shaken down at the end of the workday when she was too tired to resist. Quarles and another supervisor, Preslee, found the MP3 player in her vagina, where it probably couldn’t record much of anything, but never got her to tell them where she got it. They yanked her out of line and we never saw her again.

I wish I could walk over and ask Jaq what the plan is supposed to be, but I don’t even know where her cubicle is. The no congregating rule and the drones that enforce it after hours, whirring softly above our heads, make that certain. I stuff the pill pack into my bra under my left breast and hope the drones didn’t catch me. Then I lie down on my cot, but sleep never fully finds me.

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Seven

I’m still groggy the next morning when we line up for count outside the buses. It’s one of those cool spring mornings where the rising sun promises heat, but much later, so we still shiver in short sleeves as we wait to board the buses. Of course, they decide to spring an inspection on us.

It’s as if Quarles knows exactly where to look, because she goes straight for my bra. She whips out the pill pack so that the sharp plastic edge slices my skin. You’re, like, the last person I ever expected to break the rules, Becca, she tells me triumphantly. Wanna tell me what this is?

I shake my head. I don’t, I can’t, look her in the eye.

Quarles turns to Bisson. She doesn’t wanna tell me what this is, she snarks. Apparently, whatever yesterday’s situation with her mother was hasn’t lasted.

How did Kendra hide her pill packs before? Unless this was a first? My mind races.

Well, is it yours? Or were you holding it for someone else? Quarles leans close to my face. Because if you’re holding for someone else —

I don’t wait for her to finish her threat. I don’t know what it might have been, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Without thinking, I use my voice for the first time in months. It’s mine, I croak.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, turns her head to gawp at me. Bisson comes over to stare me down. Are you motherfucking kidding me? she snaps. Becca talks?

My heart is in my throat. What kinds of penalties might I incur for having basically lied to everyone for almost a year? Mentally I kick myself. There was a reason I was afraid of my own voice.

Then I see Reginique. Her face isn’t exactly a beacon of love and acceptance, but she pays close attention. That gives me the strength to keep going. If I can think fast enough. I found it, I say. On the floor in the bathroom.

Either they’re still shocked that I spoke, or everyone’s just groggy with the morning. Quarles holds the pill pack aloft. Then she drops it on the ground and smashes it with the heel of her boot. Well, Becca. You fucked up big time. You didn’t report found property, so basically, you stole it. Whatever you planned to do with it hardly matters. A month in solitary for you, and we’ll have to refer this to the tribunal to determine if you just added to your debt.

It doesn’t matter if I did; I never expected to get out anyway. The murder-that-isn’t-considered-murder I committed is only the half of it. I’m also a widow and I have no current professional experience; I never thought there was any other way for me to contribute to society, and it wasn’t like I exactly fit in around here. Strangely, I feel victorious as I board the bus to go to work.

#

That first night on the hard canvas cot in the in the tiny cramped closet, after the entire day of invisibility, I decide to return to being mute. I’ll catch flak for it, but that’s nothing really new. I can manage this, and it might even make the silent treatment easier to bear.

Then the nightmares come. They’re the same ones as always, except tonight they all blend together. My friends, Joni and Liza, blend into my friends-who-aren’t-really-friends on the beach, and something is terribly wrong but I can’t summon my voice to tell them. Then Tom shoots himself, and it turns into a chain reaction. One by one, all my friends shoot themselves, and I’m the only one left standing beside the girl I helped kill. She’s still alive, and she reaches for me.

I wake up drenched in sweat.

Not even the mundane thought, now I’ll have to wear my uniform into the shower, comforts me. I lie there, my breath hard and puffy. You don’t think about all the ways solitary, as a reflection of this system, affects you until you realize: it isn’t just no congregating, which means there’s no one to blow steam off to after an especially bad nightmare. There’s also no way to take comfort from a brief touch or a knowing glance, no way to get anyone to acknowledge that something might be wrong with you, because no one else wants to end up where you are. Even the location makes it worse: the little converted closet may as well be a sensory deprivation chamber, because I can’t hear the rustles of other women, the soft coughs or snores, the drones’ whir overhead. I can’t hear anything. It’s like being caught inside my own muteness.

No, that’s not true. There is something else: I start to get bits and pieces of conversation, here in the wee hours. It sounds like Reginique talking to someone else I don’t recognize.

It’s about the pill pack.

Like Reginique was supposed to be the one who passed it to Kendra.

There are other pieces too. Something about a journalist, and about an operation, but the words and their meanings are diffuse. I can’t decide whether to be glad for solitary, or not. Would I sense these little bursts of insight if I were allowed to be around other women? Or is this Reginique’s way to communicate with me while I’m here? Either way, I don’t want to know.

I just hope the nightmares stay in my head, and don’t make it to hers.

Then something occurs to me. What if I can use our newfound connection to try to find out how she’s doing? Perhaps as much a defense as a need for comfort, I reach my thoughts outward.

I haven’t done this in a long, long time; maybe not since I first met Tom, in college, when the buzz of empathic energy connected us all across term papers and all-nighters and finals and especially parties, when one roommate’s stress could bring us all down until we got together to lift her up again, and then we rode a mutual wave of positivity and light straight through exams the following day.

I’d nearly forgotten it was possible.

I focus on Reginique: the regal way she holds herself, the impassivity of her face, her dark eyes that never miss a thing, her breathy voice. I focus on the way she cradled Kendra and the way she held my bloody hand.

Before long I can feel... something. I’m not sure what it is that I feel, because it isn’t just Reginique; it’s Reginique plus. There’s a calm presence that comes to my mind in the form of a tranquil shade of sage green, and there’s another presence, one with hard edges and smooth planes. Neither one of them is anything I’ve ever associated with her, even subconsciously.

It’s like she’s communicating with people on the outside.

Before I can explore any further, I get rushed, borne up on a wave of exasperation and anger and fear, and pinned to a wall. Stay out, a voice hisses, and I’m pretty sure it’s Reginique, even though I’ve never heard her hiss. After that point, no amount of focus on her brings me back into her empathic field. Except for one moment, right as I fall asleep, so that I can’t be sure if it’s part of a dream: her voice and a question, do I want to get us killed?

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Eight

Could it be true that the use of our empathy could actually get us killed? Hyperbole, I decide, a snap statement in the heat of the moment, a figure of speech.

But what if? If not even solitary could prevent the use of empathy, then could the government decide people like us were too much of a liability to allow to live?

The question is so uncomfortable to ask that I cut that line of thought off before it can sprout. I breathe deep to try to quiet my mind, but my fear of my own nightmares is too great. I don’t manage anything better than a doze for the rest of the night.

By day I didn’t expect solitary to be all that much different from a regular shift. What I’m unprepared for is the extent of the ostracization, the deep emotional well of mistrust I sense from all directions. Is it because I lied about being mute, because I didn’t hide Kendra’s pill pack well enough, or some other reason? Until this point, I thought we were all in the same boat of labor. Now, it feels like unfriendly eyeballs pinprick me from all around the kitchen.

Other, little things happen that cut into my productive time. It happens when I leave the room to bring chafing dishes to and back from the front: a pan left to smolder on my burner, a spill on the floor of my workstation that I have to clean up. I half-expect an egg or maybe a knife to come whizzing in my direction, but it doesn’t. It’s like I’m not worth that particular effort.

I’ve never seen this happen with other women in solitary. It’s passive-aggression taken to new levels, and it makes me wonder: Did I break some unspoken racial code I didn’t know existed? Or did my dream finally make it to Reginique’s head, and she passed the information on to all the other black laborers?

Fuck it. I can last a month like this.

When I take my bathroom break, the door is locked from the outside. I hammer and yell for fifteen minutes before someone comes to unlock it. When I whip open the door, no one is there. In the kitchen everyone is heads-down.

I return to my station — once again scrambling eggs — and start to think.

Reginique was connected to people on the outside. That the two people she shared her thoughts with had their own signatures — the sage green, the edges and planes — means they’ve had time to develop those traits of their own accord. Here, laborers are all raw emotions and misery, there’s no time to cultivate emotional signatures.

I think hard back to the snippets I overheard last night. About the pill pack, and especially about the journalist, and whatever that operation is supposed to be. Is it even possible that there are journalists among us? Who record what’s going on, report it? Would anyone even care about the debts we’re working off? Most people on the outside just try to get by and don’t have emotional room to spare, especially with the empathy ban. What’s left of the government has done a pretty good job convincing the people that even things like Chantrelle’s stillbirth are a form of debt, as if one extra child in the world might lessen the workload in some way.

Not that my story can ever be a part of the other women’s. I got exactly what I deserved. And yet, the thought recurs: the whole notion of getting a reporter to tell these stories is so ridiculous, I could end my confinement right now by outing Reginique and her scheme. Maybe even get myself promoted to orderly.

But then, that would mean outing myself. Who knows what they’d try after that? A double or triple dose of inhibitors, or even antipsychotic meds? Or something worse, if I’m to go by Reginique’s sense that we’d be killed?

No, the risk probably isn’t worth the pursuit. At least, not right now. The passive-aggressive shit is displaced, I know, but I doubt anyone has the energy to sustain it for a whole month. And if they do? Well, I’ll decide how to deal with it then.

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Nine

(trigger warning: rape)

That night after work, I’m not taken directly to my broom closet. Bisson pulls me out of the bus line and takes me to the building elevators.

She’s always been a hard read, like her inhibitors are only the start of her self-repression, so it’s a surprise when she’s brusque, rough with me. She touches me when she doesn’t need to and shoves me along. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, but I know better than to ask where we’re going until we get to the elevators. Then I know.

When I first arrived, I was brought this same path to meet the facility’s general manager, a middle-aged white guy named Preston. I was told before the meeting that he wanted to get a sense for who worked in his facility. After he’d gotten his euphemistic sense, one of the other laborers told me that he liked to break in all the new laborers.

I didn’t realize he also took advantage of solitary.

It’s late, after we get back from the barracks. My feet and back are killing me from standing. I breathe, try to calm myself. I’m no longer new to the facility, and I’d love to believe that part of solitary is some kind of weird political indoctrination lesson. On the other hand, why would they bother trying to indoctrinate a lifer, relative to other acts I won’t be able to report? Bisson doesn’t give me any hints.

Deep down I know what’s going on, and I’m right. Preston doesn’t waste any time. As soon as the door is shut he grabs my arm and pushes me over to his desk, where he bends me over and pulls my pants down. No chatting me up first. No emotion.

Figures I’d have to spend even more time on my feet.

Thank Christ, he growls. I wondered when one of you stuck-up white bitches would get solitary. What’d you do? You girls don’t mouth off like the blacks, so it had to be something good. He enters me without waiting for an answer, and it’s like sandpaper. I grip the edges of his desk and try to dissociate as much as possible, but the pleasure he takes from my pain bleeds in around the edges of my inhibitors, and the best I can do is wait for it to be over. There’s nothing on his desk I could use to attack him. Like he planned it this way.

Are you the only girl in solitary? Preston grunts from behind me, Good. I’m tired of doing blacks. And the supervisors are dry and cold. Like their personalities. He laughs at his own joke.

Mercifully he finishes fast. I’m left to pull up my own pants while he buckles his.

Next time try and come on to me a little more. Would you? Or resist. Yeah. He smiles to himself. I wonder how much longer he could keep me in solitary for resisting. Especially since no laws exist anymore that limit the amount of time solitary can be used.

He opens the door and doesn’t touch me again, so I leave on my own. Bisson stands right there, and I realize she hasn’t moved, she must’ve heard everything. Again, though, she gives nothing away as she supervises my sore-feet-sore-back-sore-hooha waddle down the hallways to the elevators. She doesn’t even shove me this time.

It’s only when we’re downstairs in the darkened hall that leads to my closet that I hear her sniffle. It happens again near the door, and when she opens the door so that the light spills and pools around the exit, I chance a look at her.

Her eyes are on the floor, but her cheeks are splotched red and I swear I can see tear tracks on them before I turn my face away. She walks me back to my broom closet and doesn’t even give me a chance to turn around before she slams the door shut behind me.

Great. She heard what Preston said about her and the other supervisors and now I’m going to get penalized for it. It’ll take a miracle for me not to get a month extended indefinitely. I try not to think about that as I lie down on the cot’s tight canvas to sleep.

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Ten

I don’t sleep for long. A commotion starts sometime after I drift off. I feel it more than I hear it, a blend of anger and agitation laced with panic that eddies underneath the door together with indistinct shouts and one or two screams. Where I am, I can’t bang on the door to tell them to shut up, nor get involved in any way. I also can’t sleep. I lie awake and try to let the emotions and the sound wash over me.

Except that there’s a click as the lock turns, and then someone pulls the metal door open. It’s Jesika, the orderly. Best get yo’ ass out to the sleeping cubes, she tells me.

Just like that I get up off the cot. She hustles me out the door. What’s going on? I whisper, as if Bisson is just around the corner and will hear us.

Jesika looks like she can’t decide whether to tell me to shut up and keep moving, or dish the dirt. Finally she seems to remember that she’s just a laborer, too. Bisson went off the deep end. Drug Preston down to the sleeping area, kilt him in front of us all. There’s blood everywhere an’ I don’t think the drones know how to report it. Jesika maneuvers to a point just ahead of me.

Never in a million years would I have seen that coming. Bisson’s self-repression and quiet manner have never hinted at a darker side. A woman who didn’t know what she wanted, maybe, but not one willing to kill when she didn’t get it. She say why?

Didn’t need to. Before she kilt him, held a knife to his throat and made him repeat everything he’s said about us all.

For no reason at all I think of Tom, in the last minutes before he shot himself. The blame he laid on me for his own proclivities, his claim of victimhood of my worst desires. A knife? He must’ve said some pretty awful things. Then I remember: he did say some pretty awful things to me, last night. Bisson must have lost her shit even worse than I thought.

Oh, honey, Jesika says, "you have no idea. See, him