By Jeremy Miller

Part 3

15

I made sure I had time. I observed for a while. Got her routine. It wasn’t hard. Everything in prison is based around routine.

When her podmates were in the quilting area and she was in her room masturbating I came in.

I’ve killed men jerking off before a few times, those are funny stories. It doesn’t work the other way. Not at all.

After quilting her podmates have a shift making mattresses, so I knew she’d be alone for at least three hours. I gave her a hotshot and settled in to wait.

I got to thinking if they make this story into a movie this is where they’d put in the montage of me killing her in increasingly cruel and usual and hilarious ways and her turning up still being alive. I wish I could do that in real life. Killing the same person multiple times is really boring.

Of course, if this was a movie the woman playing me would be much more attractive than I am.

If movies have taught us anything it’s that women with perfect skin and D-cups are the best covert operatives.

My A-cups and I were in her room with her dead body for a while but not long enough to see anything happen. Why? The whole facility went on lockdown. You’re never supposed to be in another prisoner’s room according to the rules but it’s mostly unenforceable except when they do headcount.

When I got back to my pod the podmates were working on a puzzle. It’s the kind of thing I see around here regularly that is just wrong. It’s so mundane.

I’m not a puzzler. Puzzles aren’t my thing. I declined their invitation to join and headed for my room. My assigned buddy shook her head in prison mom disappointment.

“I know you think you’re the queen bitch of the world and nobody can hurt you but if you keep breaking bad with everyone someone’s going to get you eventually.”

“I don’t think I can’t be hurt, I have no illusions about being invincible. I’ve gotten my ass kicked plenty.”

“Then why do you act like this?”

“To thine own self be true.”

16After just about enough time for five women to finish a puzzle the lockdown was lifted. In short order I saw the target sitting in her pod with her podmates shooting the shit. Very much alive,

just like before.

Why the lockdown?

I don’t know if cigarettes are actually currency in men’s prisons, from what I’ve heard it’s evolved to be based on honeybuns and handjobs now, but I know that the main currency here is magazines.

I don’t remember the last time I saw a magazine outside of a doctor’s office before I came to prison but here they’re ubiquitous. Everyone (except me) has a collage on their wall of pictures they’ve cut out of magazines. It seems very juvenile to me which makes sense because the entire experience of being in prison is infantilizing. Everything you do is based on someone else telling you what to do. Everything you have someone gave to you. Everything is provided for you.

The magazines were flying hot and heavy after lockdown was lifted as women tried to buy information about what happened. There were no details to be had. No matter how rich you were in magazines. This has never happened before. No matter how many magazines were spent nobody knew anything.

Prison is like a small town, everybody knows everyone’s business. Even the guards’ business is common knowledge. When you’re in prison there’s not much to do other than snoop.

This time nobody knew anything.

I kill the target and finally I get time to observe what happens after and we go on lockdown?

First thing I thought was “this can’t be a coincidence” which is wrong because of course it could be a coincidence.

But and this is a Kim Kardashian sized butt, the timing is very suspicious.

Curiouser and curiouser.

17

I got sent to solitary again. Not for killing the target obviously. They put me in solitary because

I’m not good at making mattresses.

I call bullshit. Discipline issues. Fine. Punishment. That makes sense. I’m just not good at sewing. How is solitary confinement going to help me learn to sew better?

Dr. K came to visit me under the guise of a health check. He said he couldn’t get me out thistime, which is incorrect, he could, but I knew what he meant.

“I need your help on this one doc,” I told him. “Can you examine the target and figure out what her deal is?”

“What deal do you mean?” he asked warily.

“I’ve killed her several times in different ways and then there she is alive and well. What about Rasputin?” I asked.

“What about him?” he said, still utterly baffled by what I just laid on him.

“Didn’t they poison him and stab him and shoot him and beat him with clubs and run him over with a truck and blow him up with dynamite and he didn’t die?”

“Did they have trucks then?”

“Wasn’t he in World War One?”

We both looked at each other for a moment as we each realized we didn’t know anything about Rasputin.

“Maybe she’s like him. Just check her out.”

“Check her for being Rasputin?”

“You know what I mean,” I said, exasperated.

“I do actually, but I’m trying to point out how meaningless what you mean is. I can give her a physical. You know what shows up on a physical? Like five things. Unless a patient has symptoms to give the doctor an idea of what to look for medicine isn’t good at finding random anomalies. Especially medicine in a prison. You know what equipment I have access to here? A box of Little Mermaid band-aids and some tampons.”

“You’re here to help me man, give me something, speculate, use that big brain of yours, what do you think might be going on?”

“Are you familiar with simulation theory?”

“Sure, like the 13th Floor, it’s bullshit.”

He scowled. “The 13th Floor? You mean the Matrix?”“I never saw the Matrix, I don’t like Jennifer Lopez.”

“What?”

“A friend of mine worked in a recording studio and he said Jennifer Lopez was a bitch to all the staff there so I don’t watch her movies or listen to her music or buy her line of wigs.”

“Jennifer Lopez wasn’t in the Matrix! She had nothing to do with the Matrix. Keanu Reeves was in the Matrix!”

“You’re thinking of Speed.”

“Keanu Reeves was in Speed but he was also in the Matrix!”

“No, you’re thinking of Ghost Rider.”

“That was Nicholas Cage!”

“Why are you getting so upset?”

“I . . .” he stopped and looked around like he forgot where he was for a second. “I don’t know actually. Probably because I’m in a women’s prison.”

“You aren’t taking advantage?”

“That is disgusting, immoral, and illegal. I resent the implication.”

“Disgusting, Immoral, and Illegal, that would be a good album name.”

18

One time the girl from the Hunger Games went on Conan and talked about her butt plugs a lot.

Which is neither here nor there, but I wanted to remind everyone about that. She was in this movie called Red Sparrow where she was a sexy sex spy who sexed everyone in sexy sex sex times and only sex could save the day.

My team gives me low marks in the Red Sparrow category which is not 100% fair. Am I the best operative to seduce a specific target? Probably not. But the idea that I am not anyone’s type is incorrect. I’m a bunch of dudes’ type. That type is sad flabby balding weirdos for the most part, but that type exists.

Point being that it wasn’t that hard for me to seduce the guard who looks like Miley Cyrus if she was an Asian man.“So what’s the deal with [NAME REDACTED]?” I asked him as he was struggling to buckle his belt.

“Huh?” he dumbed dumbly. “What do you care?”

“Just tell me bro.”

“Why would I do that?” he laughed, “you weren’t that good.”

“Why? Because you just committed statutory rape. Inmates legally can’t consent to sex, which I’m certain you know. I’ll tattle on you if you don’t do what I say.”

He tried to bow up on me because of course he did, men don’t like getting threatened by women (most of them anyway, see above) and especially men who are used to being the ones doing the abusing don’t like being threatened.

I punched him in the thigh. Which might sound funny but it’s not. Not the way I do it. He fell down with a squawk like a kicked chicken, grabbing at his paralyzed leg.

“Hurts doesn’t it? You’ll be alright in a minute. Probably. Nerve damage is always possible.

What was your name? Gorg? Edom? Something short. Here’s what I know about men, Puck, they’re like dogs, they come in three main types. I don’t know what the ratio is but most of them are in these two categories, dogs that are literally all bark and won’t bite even when you smack them around, and the dogs that bark and bark and bark but will bite if you force them to. The third kind is the smallest category, the true predators. The ones who get put down after biting a

kid’s face off at a birthday party. And another thing I know is you’re one of the first two kinds.

Which means I don’t have to worry about you. You follow me?”

I guess he didn’t because he lunged at me from his one knee position. Which is a pretty bad position to try and lunge at someone from. I stepped back and stomped his head into the floor. I think he understood after that.

We’ll see.

19

I went to solitary again for assaulting a guard. I misjudged Kip or Ned or Saul, whatever his name is. He tattled on me before I could tattle on him. I was hoping Dr. K was going to come visit me again because I really need someone to bounce ideas off at this point.

Instead guards came to take me to see the warden. They call her the prison superintendent but that’s what she is.She looks like every mousy naggy female character from a male driven comedy. Not the one who’s secretly hot without her glasses and eventually learns to “loosen up” and gives Jason Segel a blowjob under the table in the last scene, the other one, the one who gets shit on by an elephant and everyone laughs. Because she’s not hot. And therefore the object of derision.

She made a big show of waiting until we were alone in her office before she leaned forward and stage whispered.

“I know why you’re here.”

“I should hope so, you’re the warden.”

She shook her head theatrically. “No, I know why you’re really here.”

“I’m sure you do,” I drawled.

She cupped her hands around her mouth. She was acting like she was in an old movie where people worried about lip readers.

“When a person closes up completely, trying to guaranty themselves against their own obliteration, all they do is die a different kind of death. Like a piece of fossilized wood.”

That was weird enough that I started paying attention.

“Are you saying that someone here is already dead in some way?”

She moved her hands to not only cover her mouth but to cover most of her face. “Immortality?

What does that word even mean? There is one universal truth. All that exists will die. Everything has something against which it has no defense, for most of us it’s time, or disease, for others you need to get creative.”

“Sure, the right tool for every job, do you have anything useful to tell me or are you just going to say creepy shit? Is this a Castle Rock situation? Are you playing the role of the guy from Whiplash? Is the person we’re talking about Bill Skarsgård in this situation? Was he the Antichrist? I never watched the last few episodes.”

She tilted her head like my aunt’s stupid parrot used to do when it started mimicking her gross sex noises. “Endings aren’t the punishment, they’re the mercy. It’s the ones who keep circling the drain forever that you need to worry about.”

“Alright, fuck this.”20

In shows when the head honcho is taken hostage they always yell to their minions, “Take the shot, don’t worry about me!” Superintendent Sally had a different take on hostage situations. She screamed, “Do whatever she wants!” when I drug her out of her office with a knife at her throat.

Do prison guards have access to guns? They must, right? Locked away somewhere? But I’ve never heard of prisoners having guns even when they take control of the prison.

I was trapped in the hallway outside of the main office area but I wasn’t trying to get out.

“Bring me [NAME REDACTED]!” I yelled through the door at the Deputy Superintendent (big dude with a giant head, looked like a cross between Edward James Olmos and Jimmy Smits with just a splash of Jeff Goldblum) and the gaggle of office people and guards with him.

“We can’t do that,” he said over the speaker thing.

Superintendent Sally shrieked back “Yes you can, I give you permission!”

I’m certain she’s wrong about that, their procedure is surely not to give the hostage taker more hostages, but she was trying her cowardly best to convince them. They tried to talk me down and eventually caved in, which I’m sure means they should all be fired. Eventually they brought Her into the hallway.

I chucked Superintendent Sally aside and grabbed the target. She struggled a little but like the other times I killed her it didn’t matter. I would have felt sorry for her if she wasn’t so fucking annoying, not dying and all.

I pushed her up against the glass Edward Jimmy Goldblum and his crew were behind.

“Check this out,” I said as I stabbed the shit out of her. And I mean good.

They rushed in to try and grab me at that point, but I had Sally around the throat again to ward them off.

I pointed with the bloody knife. “Just watch, she’s going to get up in a minute, or there’s going to be a flash of light and she’s going to be alive again, something freaky is going to happen and I want you all to see it.”

“She needs medical attention!”

“She’s fucking dead brother, I stabbed her in the brainstem like a thousand times. Stay where you are or the warden gets it! Just watch her. Something is going to happen. Any minute now. It’sgoing to be something, trust me. Something with quantum realms or clones or different dimensions or something. Just watch. She’s not really dead.”

“Any minute now,” I said five minutes later.

“I don’t know how long it takes,” I admitted ten minutes later.

“It might take an hour,” I said half an hour later, “but I know it doesn’t take longer than that, this isn’t the first time I’ve killed her.”

I’m not going to say that I’m such an ice-cold piece of work that nothing can shock me, but there’s not a lot that really throws me off guard. Having said that, when the guards and administrative people parted and Dr. K walked up I was thoroughly flabbergasted.

“What the hell?” I asked, because, what the hell?

He glanced at the dead woman and the gallons of blood on and around her. “Well . . . we’ve never had anyone do that before. That was certainly . . . a choice. ”

21

We retired to 2 Scoops Ice Cream because while a women’s prison isn’t so bad they don’t have ice cream. Dr. K was giving me looks like when someone is picking out a new puppy, he was looking for something but he didn’t know what it was himself.

“Why didn’t you try talking to her?” he asked.

“You know, that never occurred to me,” I admitted, sucking on 2 Scoops signature Jail Break

Shake.

“That’s usually what people try eventually.”

I shrugged. “So how’d you do it? Clones? Did you clone her?”

“That’s need-to-know information. And I don’t mean that in the sense of information that you

only get told because you need it to complete an objective, I mean that you only get that information if you need to know it or you’ll go insane because you’ve seen something inexplicable based on all logic and reason.”

I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t need to know.”

Dr. K’s smile was what they call “beauteous” and that’s something because he’s not a beautiful man.“You have no idea how happy that makes me. That’s the final test. People who need to know, they can’t be trusted. They’re too invested. You can’t count on them. Do you realize what a rare bird you are?”

“Yeah,” I said, eying a kid’s cookie ice cream sandwich and wondering if I should have ordered that instead. Or also. “So what’s the pitch? I passed your Kobayashi Maru hot dog challenge and what? Is this some Men Who Stare At Goats shit? I get to be a man in black? Area 51? The elite of the elite of the elite? Assassinating wizards? Vampires? Something even weirder?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Fortean events, unexplained human phenomena, cryptozoology, out of place objects, whatever you want to call it, there’s more going on than you’ve been exposed to so far. If you want the job, if you want to join the team, you can learn things that very few people know, that even fewer people should know. And if not, if you decide that it’s not for you, no hard feelings.”

“No hard feelings meaning you’d kill me?”

“No need to make a decision right away, you can have until you’re done with your ice cream to think about it.”

“Fair.”

The End

By Jeremy Miller

Part 2

8

I’ve heard that solitary confinement can drive a person insane over a long enough time. I didn’t have to find out because I have a man on the inside. Doctor K I call him. It’s not a codename, it’s just what I call him because I don’t know his real name. We don’t use codenames. It would be cool if we did.

I worked with an asset once who was half-Egyptian and half-Native American. That was the coolest combo I heard of until I met Dr. K. He’s half-Samoan and half-Italian. Those places are so far away from each other! His parents were both born and raised in America though, which is a bummer.

I was only in solitary for a couple of hours when Dr. K paid me a call but I was already pretty bored. I can see how it could drive you mad.

“Help me doctor, I have terrible swelling of the perineum, I need some Flintstones chewable morphine.”

“What happened to him?” he asked, rudely ignoring me. Men, am I right?

It’s always the first question he asks. “Him” meaning the doctor whose place he’s temporarily filling. He lives in terror that other medical professionals are being hurt or killed so he can take their place.

Dr. K is too high strung for this job but we have to make do with the people available. There are a lot of people involved in covert bullshit that shouldn’t be. Not me obviously. I’m fine.

“He and his family won a trip to Hawaii.”

I told him that because that’s what I always tell him. It’s like a bit we do. Ease the tension a little.

Dr. K gave me a knife and signed some papers to get me out of solitary for medical reasons. Why do I need a knife? Couldn’t I take out the target with my bare hands and feet and elbows and knees like a real badass? Probably. But why take the train when you can fly?

When I got back to my pod, mommy-buddy and the other podlings were amazed.

“How did you get out?” exclaimed the podling who looks like Shawn Wayans when he was pretending to be a white woman in that movie Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans Pretend To Be White Women.

“I just explained to the guards that I had a good reason for ripping that woman’s lip off. Theyunderstood. They’re very accommodating if you just open up a dialogue.”

9

Is luck a thing? Some cultures think so. I think I know which cultures but I don’t want to guess.

You have to be careful about cultures. If you say the wrong thing you might be an asshole.

On my third day my target and I were both on the chore wheel to wash the prison transport vans.

That’s some good luck.

Remember that scene in Cool Hand Luke? You know the one I mean. It was just like that. Only instead of being sexy it was 45 damn degrees, windy, overcast, and we were freezing our asses off.

Here’s a fun fact. A decent number of women puke their guts out when they’re being transported to prison. Maybe because of withdrawal, maybe because of stress, maybe a little of both. And it’s not unusual for some of them to piss and or shit themselves in the van from time to time as well.

Talk about NOT a cool hand.

There were supposed to be guards watching us but like most people prison guards are bad at their job. One of them never showed up and the other one wandered off after a few minutes with a stern warning for us not to fuck around.

The target didn’t look like the head of a massive drug distribution ring but the only person I have for reference is Catherine Zeta-Jones in Traffic. And there aren’t many people who look like Catherine Zeta-Jones, so add in the rarity of big time narco traffickers and you end up with a small Venn Diagram.

Plus, there’s the fact that she may not be the head of a massive drug distribution ring. That’s what they told me. They may have said that to try to make it easier for me. She might just have some dirt on the Governor of South Dakota. It might not even be that serious, she might just be someone who got their kid into a prep school ahead of someone else. Plenty of people with connections use them for the pettiest shit.

In Grosse Pointe Blank the guy who I always think is Ron Livingston but isn’t plays a hitman.

He’s supposed to be the good guy so they have to give him moral justification for hitmanning so we can enjoy the movie. His justification is that if you piss someone off enough for them to pay money for you to die then you must be an asshole so it’s okay.

It’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You know who can afford to pay money to have people killed? Rich people. And you know who rich people like having killed? People who are trying to make them less rich.It’s okay though because Not Ron Livingston’s love for the woman I always think is Amy

Brenneman but isn’t is so powerful that he gives up his murderous ways so they can be together forever.

I understand why they tell me my targets are bad people. It makes sense for them to do that.

Truth is I don’t care. What’s my justification? What makes me a good person you’d want to root for and not a monster?

I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

10

In the movies and on TV they usually go for the throat slit. I suppose it looks dramatic. Or maybe it’s just easier to light. It’s harder to cut a throat than you think. People survive a cut throat at a decent rate, especially if the cutter is doing it for the first time. As long as the cuttee gets medical attention.

My method is lung, lung, liver, liver (one end then the other, I know people don’t have two livers) and kidney, kidney. That usually gets the job done. The key is to wait and make sure. A few more stabs might be required. Throat-cutters often run off before they’re sure. Natural quitters they are.

This is assuming I catch someone unawares or I have them under control, obviously if they’re fighting me with any degree of real ability I take my stabs where I can get them.

The target made no such ruckus. I walked up behind her and bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam I did my thing.

She smeared blood all over the van she had been cleaning as she slumped against it and then slid to the ground. All that hard work for nothing. It breaks the heart.

The other two van cleaners were not within line of sight but process of elimination and all they would know that I had done it. They didn’t turn around as I came around the van into their general area.

“I considered killing you as well, just to be on the safe side, don’t make me regret that I didn’t.”

They just kept on van-wiping. Which I took as agreement they were going to keep quiet.

11

I don’t know what the prison protocol is for when they find someone dead. I expected something to happen.

It didn’t take me long to figure out why nothing did. A couple hours later in the cafeteria (they don’t call it that but that’s what it is) I saw the target who should have been very dead sitting at a table very much not dead from a fatal stabbing.

First thought. I got the wrong person. Unlikely but everyone makes mistakes. Even if I got the wrong person though someone still died. Why didn’t the guards have me and the two other van-wipers in solitary or being interrogated?

Second thought, she survived somehow. She wasn’t breathing when I left her there in an Olympic size pool of her own blood but you never know. Humans can survive some crazy shit. I worked with a guy whose chute didn’t open on a HALO jump and he lived. He was fucked up for the rest of his life but he lived. Unlikely things happen sometimes.

Even if she lived she should be in the infirmary at the least, evacuated to a real hospital most likely. She shouldn’t have been sitting there eating a mung bean salad.

I was moving on to thought three when buddy-mommy and one of my other podmates came up to my table. They told me that the Pod Six Crew had attacked one of “us” because of what I did – the trespassing and the lip ripping and so forth.

“Oh yeah?” I said, using the universal tone for ‘don’t care’.

“Yeah,” the podling who looks like a methhead Kathryn Bigelow said bodying up on me like a yappy little dog, “they beat the shit out of her.”

That caught my interest a little. “Did they now? I’d be curious to know what her injuries are, I hate to say it, but most women can’t hand out much of a beating. Even when it’s three or four against one. It’s just not something most women have experience with.”

“They stabbed her with a screwdriver!” chicken littled my mentor-buddy.

“That’s not bad,” I admitted. “What do you guys know about her?” I asked, chinning at the target.

“Are you listening to us?” demanded methhead Kathryn Bigelow.

“Sure baby, whatever you want, I’ll mess ‘em up good, give me some info.”

12My podmates had nothing to tell me about the target. I wasn’t expecting they’d give me the solution, but I was hoping they’d at least feed me a ghost story like she’s been here since the prison opened and hasn’t aged a day. That’s not really what women do though, not after the age of 13 anyhow.

Someone steals a magazine and this place will be hopping with gossip for a minimum of seven days. Who did it? And why? Because we ladies like to gab about real shit. We don’t make stuff up. Dudes go the other way. They don’t talk about much but when they do decide to talk it’s usually crap they made up. There’s some kind of lesson in there about genders.

Even though they proved to be useless I went on the Raid on Pod Six as I promised. 22% because I might need the podlings as allies but 77% (1% margin of error) because violence helps me think. For me fucking people up is like knitting or doodling is for some people or like driving is for morons – it keeps me occupied enough that I can let my mind wander.

So, the supernatural. Am I thinking that’s what I have on my hands? Not yet. If you talk to enough servicemen and spooks, which I have, you hear the crazy stuff. Every airman has a friend of a friend of a friend who an alien waved at out the window of a UFO. Every soldier has a friend of a friend of a friend who saw a giant in Iraq. Every sailor has a friend of a friend of a friend who got their taint tickled by a creature from the deep.

Do I believe any of it? No, see above about men and their ways.

But I don’t disbelieve it.

I don’t know if this is true, but there’s a rumor that one intelligence agency adopted a policy after a particularly bad fuckup where a bunch of people got killed that if everyone agrees on something as true one person has to play Devil’s Advocate. If everyone agrees that The Black Sword terrorists aren’t going to attack, one person has to argue that they will. It’s supposed to help stop groupthink.

It’s not a bad policy. The world is a strange place and getting stranger every day. I’m not going to start sharpening stakes because “clearly” the target is a vampire but there’s no reason to rule anything out either.

Adaptability let’s call it.

13

I never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer but I heard there’s an episode where Buffy has to slay a vampire by strangling him with her thighs because his vampire power is that he can’t be killed by weapons forged by mortal hands. I guess in Buffy the Vampire Slayer each vampire has a different special power. Which is nice for them. Everyone should feel special even if they’re not.I figured I’d take a page from the Buffster and try strangling the target in case stabbing just wasn’t the right method. Maybe she just has really strong organs or they regenerate. There are people out there with hyper-dense bones who never get sick so why not? Mother Nature is always coming up with new strange shit.

It’s a cliché I know but I got her in the shower. Nobody was naked but you can pretend if you’re into that. Not to go all “crane guy” on you but strangulation is something they never show realistically in media. And like my Uncle Tim it goes both ways.

If you try for a classic grab the throat with your hands it’s going to take forever. It’s really hard and it takes a long time. This is what you call an air choke. If you know what you’re doing and you can perform a “blood choke” where you are compressing the carotid arteries it’s surprisingly quick.

When you see someone choked to death on screen it’s either too fast for a blood choke or too long for that and not long enough for an air choke. I get it, you can’t spend forty-five minutes of screen-time on a choking scene but why not go for blunt force trauma? It’s realistic, it’s quick and it’s more cinematic.

I wanted to watch for a while and see if she was going to start breathing again or get back up or her belly was going to crack open and a new version of her was going to crawl out or whatever was going to happen. But I didn’t have the chance.

Women were coming in, to shower you know, so I had to choke and then skedaddle. I considered just threatening them into silence like the van crew but decided against it. Intimidation is a method you need to use sparingly if you want it to be effective.

A few hours later I saw her sitting by the phone bank reading Southern Living, very much alive.

Just like before.

But how?

14

I’ve never had trouble killing anyone before. Emotionally I mean. I literally have had trouble killing people. Some people are hard to kill. I bet Steven Seagal is not one of them.

Killing the same person over and over is starting to make me feel things. “Arms of An Angel” Tori Amos abused dog commercial things. It started when I was bashing her head against the wall by the therapist’s office. I was talking up blunt force trauma before so I decided to put my money where my mouth is.I came up from behind her unawares because I’m great at my job but when she slumped to the ground not quite dead yet she flopped around to face me. I’ve looked people in the face before as they died, it never bothered me, but this time it got to me. There was something in her eyes. I don’t know. Maybe she reminded me of someone.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she wasn’t so easy to kill. If I really had to struggle to get her it would bother me less. So far she’s shown no ability to defend herself at all. I’ve done plenty of bad shit to defenseless people but then you move on. It hits different when you have to keep doing it.

After I saw her a few hours later, very much not dead and flirting with the guard who looks like Miley Cyrus if she was an Asian man I went to the chapel for the first time. Pastor Dave is the spitting image of Pete Carroll. Swear to god.

“So what’s the deal with the resurrection?” I asked him as he was chopping up the packages of smack he brings in for the Aryan Lassies to sell.

Pastor Dave didn’t even look up, he ordered his little baggies into a straighter line with the patience of a man laying out communion wafers.“Resurrection? Jesus was raised bodily from the dead by God on the third day after his crucifixion and burial, exalting him to the near presence of God in eternal glory. It’s the basis of Christianity.”

“Yeah, but like, how?”

He glanced at me, eyes bright, friendly, like we were at church camp. “How?”

“How does it happen? How does it work? What are the mechanics?”

He turned back to his work with a smile “There are none. That’s not what it’s about.”

“What if it was? What if I told you that someone keeps dying and coming back to life?”

“I’d say you need a complete physical and psychological exam.”

“But what if I didn’t?”

He paused and thought. “If someone gets back up once, it’s a miracle. If they keep getting back up, it’s a lesson.” He tapped his cheek for a second. “God doesn’t raise people from the dead because He’s sentimental. He’s trying to teach someone something.”

“Guilt?”

“Maybe,” he shrugged

By Jeremy Miller

Part 1

1

I watched an action movie with this guy once. Why? We were on a date. We hadn’t progressed past non-banal date activities like going to a movie. I don’t remember the name of the movie but it has a scene where Jason Statham is driving a crane down the highway going a hundred miles an hour and swinging the wrecking ball around smashing bad guys. That wasn’t the whole movie (probably) but it’s what I remember.

He was smashing the bad guy cars anyway. You didn’t see any of the actual bad guys get squished. We were left to infer their horrible deaths for ourselves. It’s called bloodless carnage in showbiz. It satisfies the violent baboon instincts in our brains without making us sad by seeing the true horror of violence. The audience wants to see the people that made Jason Statham mad get killed but they don’t like to see them crying and bleeding and shitting themselves as they die.

This isn’t Saving Private Ryan for God’s sake. Realistic violence is just not good for a four- quadrant hit.

Anyway, the guy I was on a date with, who probably had a name (Gary? Terry? Spillane?Grunkis?) spent the whole time walking out of the movie theater and the whole time walking through the parking lot and the whole time driving away complaining about how unrealistic the crane scene was.

He was a crane operator. He knows how cranes work damn it and what Jason Statham was doing is not how cranes work. He couldn’t get over it. All he had to do was shut up about the damn crane and make a move and he was going to get laid. He just couldn’t. Guys are like that sometimes. Dog with a bone. They can’t let go.

Unrealistic movie scenes related to my job don’t bother me. I can enjoy James Bond or . . . wait, are there any other spy movie franchises? Kingsmen? Is the Kingsmen about spies? Oh, Mission Impossible! That’s another. Anyway, I can enjoy that stuff even though it is not a fair and accurate representation of reality.

Who would want to watch a realistic spy story? That would be boring.

2

The first idea was to send me in undercover as a lawyer. Once I was inside they’d have some other agents in place incite a prison riot. Then it was up to me to get access to the target during the chaos.

This is a prime example of the unrealistic nature of spy movies. M never comes up with a dumbass plan for Bond that has no chance of working.People like to think that doctors and military personnel and politicians and people with jobs that affect their lives and wellbeing are of a higher quality than the co-workers they complain to their spouse about. Sure, Johnson fromAnalytics might be a moron but the guy flying my plane has his shit together.

Nope.

I get why people have an assumption of competence. It would be impossible to leave your house and do anything if you allowed yourself to think about how everything going on around you is in the hands of people as drunk and stupid and lazy as everyone else. You’d never get out of bed if you let yourself face that truth. Like a lot of human thought this delusion is a defense mechanism.

I pointed out that the first thing prison staff do in a riot is put the facility on lockdown. Which I felt would make it very difficult to get anywhere. The next plan they came up with was we should do a “reverse Shawshank”. Someone mentioned Papillon. One ding-dong wanted to drop me into the exercise yard from a hot air balloon.

They say when you’re brainstorming there’s no such thing as a bad idea. This is incorrect. Lots of ideas are bad. Most of them maybe.

Eventually the plan we decided on was undercover as a prisoner. Was it the best idea? Probably.

But we only arrived at it because we ran out of steam. It wasn’t decided on; it was just the last idea on the table when we got hungry.

3

My lawyer friend has told me a few times that women’s prisons aren’t so bad. Not only because women are vastly less likely to be violent psychopaths than men but also because society is much more willing to allow women’s prisons to be nicer.

Nobody wants men’s prisons to have amenities. At all. They don’t want male prisoners to be rehabilitated. They want them to be tortured. And not that sissy Abu Ghraib kind of torture, the good old-fashioned down home patriotic kind of torture from when this was a country of real men and not whiny little babies.

A man was convicted of a crime? Any crime? And you want to spend my hard-earned tax dollars giving him a toothbrush? He should be beaten and raped every day from now until Jesus comes to send him to Hell!

That’s what people want for the male prison population, but they’re willing to cut women a little slack. A man goes to prison that’s justice, people are happy. Fuck that guy. A woman goes to prison and people are sad. Something went wrong with society. The poor lady needs our help.

The women’s prison my friend went to when she was a public defender had an art studio. They offered a catalog of classes. They had substance abuse programs and therapists, and they raised chickens in a lovely big green outdoor space.I think she went a little overboard in saying how nice it would be in a women’s prison. It probably depends on the prison. There must be some place where they send the women Charlize Theron plays in movies when she wants to win an Academy Award.

My feeling is that society isn’t entirely wrong. In this instance. According to a statistic I just made up half the women in prison are there because of some scheme her dirtbag boyfriend cooked up and then when the shit hit the fan he left her holding the bag.

If you ever want to see what true emotional devastation looks like (which I don’t know why you would) take a look at the footage of a woman in a police interrogation the exact moment when she realizes that her “boyfriend” is not going to confess to drug trafficking to save her. It’s almost like maybe he didn’t love her.

Say what you want about men, they know how to hit for distance.

Point being, it’s easy to see why there’s more sympathy for female inmates.

4

You may be thinking (you may even be assuming) that the prison staff were in on the plan. That meetings were set up. That middle-aged men gathered in conference rooms. Zoom calls were held. Calendar invites were sent out by assistants. People were on their phones in Beltway traffic.

Arrangements were made.

It’s a reasonable thing to think. What might help you going forward is understanding that there’s nothing reasonable about my job.

One thing that is accurate about your James Bonds and similar movies is how small covert operations are. Bond is told that he’s supposed to go shoot a guy in the face who’s trying to poison the ionosphere or whatever the fuck and they give him a watch that emits a neutron laser and they tell him the name of a guy in Uzbekistan that might know something about it and off he goes all alone.

That’s not far off.

The point of secret shit is that it’s secret. The CIA wasn’t selling crack to inner city youths just because they were racists, they needed money to fund their illegal activities. Going to Congress to ask for funding for your operation is the opposite of secret. Well sort of, nobody pays much attention to Congressional sessions, but a few people do pay attention and they’d tell someone and then Jon Stewart would talk about it on a podcast and then it wouldn’t be a secret.

The prison staff weren’t in on anything, they didn’t know anything. I got into prison the usualway people do (well white people anyway). By committing a crime. Several crimes actually. It’s harder to get locked up than you’d think. Law enforcement isn’t on top of things the way I’d like them to be.

I’ll take the hit on the first one. The first one was my bad. I found a guy on the sex offender registry and forced him swallow razor blades until he died. That was my mistake. He died before he could call 911. And when someone finally went to the house to find his dead body and call the cops it was a week later.

But the bigger problem was that nobody cared he was dead. Not to mention it’s really hard to solve a murder that’s done at random. The homicide detectives had my image on his Ring cam and they had my fingerprints and DNA but even if they had really tried to solve the case what good would that have done unless they knew who I was and that I might be a suspect?

So what was an oopsie-doodle. Killing someone I had no connection to. I saw Strangers on a Train, I should know better. I should have dated the guy for a while before I murdered him, given the detectives some social media posts to work from.

Now the gas stations I put on the robbery squad. After the seventh time I robbed a gas station and was loitering in the area afterwards I started to wonder how the cops ever solve a robbery.

I hit paydirt when I went to a country club and bum-rushed a rich guy. Which is what I should have done in the first place. You bust into the dining room at a fancy club to kick a rich old man in the dick shouting anti-capitalist propaganda and they’re going to get you. I should have known that.

5

Did you know that you can’t plead guilty when you get arraigned? Even if you already confessed. The legal system is an odd beast.

An odd slow beast. Six months after I savagely beat an old man and slapped his mistress so hard she got partial paralysis in her face I actually got processed into prison. I don’t know why I got charged for the slap, most of her face was already paralyzed by Botox. Seems like a ‘no harm, no foul’ situation.

The prison staff wasn’t “in” on it but strings were pulled to get me into the right prison. They’ll be pulled again to get me paroled when the job is over. Assuming they don’t leave me to rot.

One nice surprise is that nobody tried to sexually assault me during my voyage through the various custodies I was in. I figured at the least one guard (they don’t like being called that BTW) would finger my butthole but there was none of that, not even a fondling.Kudos prison system!

That having been said it’s pretty outrageous that male corrections officers are allowed in women’s facilities. I suppose they don’t have much choice. There probably aren’t a lot of women clamoring for those jobs.

After they hosed me down and deloused me and gave me my uniform it was still hours before they actually chucked me into genpop. I had to talk to a counselor and some other lady with the department of whatever and this and that. It’s like they were actually trying to help me with the difficult transition.

When they finally turned me loose (so to speak) they assigned me a prison buddy to show me around. She said she’s thirty-three but she looked sixty-three. Most jarring of all she looked like amom. She had that mom shape. Seeing her in prison bothered me more than anything else. She was just so out of place.

“So what’d you do?” I asked her while she was telling me how to get an extra blanket if I get chilly.

“You never ask anyone that,” she explained to me.

Fair enough.

6

My prison mom-buddy was showing me the chore wheel. She didn’t call it that but that’s what it is. Three days a week you make low quality mattresses for other prisons and you rotate through other jobs the other two days, cooking and laundry and stuff like that.

She stopped explaining to say to me “Are you . . . uh . . . you don’t seem . . . um . . . I’ve been doing this a long time and you’re very collected. Have you been inside before?”

“No, but I watched a couple episodes of Wentworth, I think I got the gist of it.”

She dead-faced me. I guess humor isn’t big around here.

“I’ve been in worse places,” I explained.

“Bad marriage?” she asked with soulful ‘I know about that honey’ mom-eyes.

“Nah, I haven’t found the right fellow yet.”

I saw her flinch when I said “fellow”. It’s not uncommon. A lot of people assume I’m a lesbianjust because I’m tall and muscular and I was good at sports and I was in the military and I have short hair and I don’t wear make-up and because of the way I stand and walk and talk and act and live my entire life.

I guess their assumptions are fair now that I think about it.

“Isn’t this a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment?” I asked, tapping on the forced labor rules she was explaining.

She froze like a possum in a floodlight. “I . . . don’t know.”

“There must be some exception. Where’s the library? I should look it up.”

“Can I just finish the items on my checklist please?” she fretted.

“What difference does it make?”

“I’ll get in trouble if I don’t do everything on the list.”

I dropped her a wink. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“Someone will,” she said, looking around like we were being watched.

“I thought snitches got shanked in the shower. Shivved. Is it shivved or shanked? What’s the difference between a shiv and shank? Or do you shank someone with a shiv? Hey, how do you keister a shiv without ripping your asshole apart like shredded pork? I saw that on Justified, is that a real thing? You know, you don’t even need to make a shiv to stab someone, if you practice you can do it with just your fingers. You might break them a couple of times at first but it’s possible. ”

I could see that I was freaking her out so I stayed quiet after that and let her finish new hire orientation. The last thing she did was show me where the panic button is.

“Never use it,” she said solemnly.

“Cool, just like Wentworth,” I told her.

7

The conventional wisdom is that your first day in prison you should attack the biggest guy you can find with a lunch tray so everyone thinks you’re crazy and nobody will make you their bitch.

But as a wise man once pointed out that plan can backfire because “some men like their bitches crazy.”I had no intention of doing that, but I did end up in solitary on my second day.

I was looking around, getting the lay of the land and this girl confronted me. She rolls up on me and she told me that I shouldn’t be in her pod. The cells (rooms, honestly) are arranged in pods so each pod can be sealed off individually. For fire prevention I suppose.

“No, it’s cool,” I told her.

Okay. Here’s something about me. You can curse me, you can cuss me, you can say whatever you want, you can throw things at me, you can shoot at me, you can try to burn me alive, throw acid at me, stab me, whatever you want. I don’t get upset. That’s the job.

I don’t like being grabbed. You get grabbed a lot in prison. Guards put their hands on you all the time. I was grabbed more in those 30-whatever hours than I had been in my adult life. But that’s the guards. I wasn’t going to take that from her.

It’s a weakness of mine.

She grabbed my sleeve as I walked past her so she could sass me some more.

I should get a ton of credit because all I did was take her to the ground and push her face into the floor while I explained to her that grabbing me was nothing to take lightly. I could have hurt her a lot worse. A lot worse. Her friend, whose back-up I assume empowered her sassiness despite being a foot shorter than me, got her bottom lip ripped off.

I could have hurt her a lot worse too. A lot worse.

But that doesn’t matter. I still got sent to solitary