0026: It's Better Here

0026: “What’d you do?”

The woman yanking on her dress has thick and leathery skin. There’s a scar down her neck and into her chest. Her hair is made of stringy ash. 

She couldn’t be older than forty-five, but her skin and hair tell a different tale. She smiles. Her gums protrude with a severe lack of functioning teeth. 

The woman reminds Everly of the lost souls she sees by the side of the road, living in abodes created with sheets and shopping carts. Everly always wonders how they got there.

She imagines them as newborns, fragile with glossy eyes and tiny palms wrapping around their mother’s fingers. Open vessels, waiting to receive whatever the world pours into them.

What got poured into this woman? 

“I’m Vivian.”

“Everly.” 

“What you do?”

“I’m not supposed to be here.” 

“But you are here.”

“They said I’d be out this morning.”

“Ha.” 

“What?”

“You’re not getting out when you are put back here.”

“Why?” 

Vivian looks at Everly, her face full of resigned disappointment. “Come on, what’d you do?” she squints at Everly through her sagging eyelids. 

Vivian thinks Everly is hiding something, and she wants to know what it is. Vivian loves gossip. Gossip and the jail’s grilled cheese sandwich. It’s chewy but good. 

“I drove home from a Halloween party,” Everly says. 

Vivian’s head tilts back as her gaze slides down the shaft of her nose to meet Everly’s stare.“Ah, you killed someone.”

“What? No.” Not last night, anyway. She’s so tired. It has been 26 hours since she’s slept.

Vivian raises a finger and points across the room. “See that one over there? She’s sitting outside her house minding her own business. Holding a shotgun. It accidentally went off. Happened to hit her husband right in the gut.”

“What?”

“And that one?” Vivian signals to a frail inmate with patchy, matted hair. The woman has a small tower of wrapped sandwiches at each corner of her bunk bed. “She’s been here a few weeks.”

“A few WEEKS? What did she do?”

Vivian shakes her head and shrugs. “Dunno. Guards won’t tell her. Doesn’t matter, does it? We all stuck here.”

Vivian’s gaze shifts, as if she’s watching a slideshow of horrors. 

“It’s better than the place they’ll send you next...”