1 Straight to Hell Read Free Page B

nothing, I finally risked a look at her eyes.  What I saw stunned me.  Here was a face of such loneliness and desperation that I let go of the bars and took a step closer to her.
    Seeing that I was watching, she said, “If I would have known this was gonna happen to me, I never would have said those things to my brother.”  Her lower lip trembled.  “I wish I would have kept my big mouth shut.  You know?”  Her brown eyes looked into mine, pleading.
    She looked so miserable that I couldn’t bear it.  “I think your brother understands,” I said, wanting to console her.
    But instead of looking relieved, she sadly shook her head.
    “It will be okay,” I told her.  “Really.”  I came a little closer and reached out to pat her shoulder, then thought better of it.  “He’s got to know you care about him.”
    She pressed her lips tightly together.  “I sure as hell hope so.”
    “Straight!”
    I jumped as if I’d been goosed by a shank.  Standing at the cell door was a small woman with a clipboard whose iron-gray hair matched her uniform.  “Get over here,” she demanded.
    Relieved to be going, I hurried over to the door which slid open with a metallic clank.  “Follow me,” the woman in the uniform said.
    “So I’m free to leave?”
    The woman gave me a strange look.  “No.”
    “No?”  I stopped walking.  “I demand to know what I’m being arrested for.”  I folded my arms over my chest and gave her a level look.
    “And I’m taking you to someone who can explain all of that.”  Her patronizing tone infuriated me, but I followed her out of the cell.  Just before the door closed, she looked over at my cellmate.   “Hey, hon,” her voice softened so that she sounded more like a nurse than a prison matron.  “You want to leave now?”
    The woman on the couch shook her head sadly.
    A little bit of high school English crept back into my mind.  Hawthorne, I think.  The saddest prison of all, he’d said, the human heart .  Looking at my former cellmate, I knew exactly what he meant.
    But my concerns for my former cellmate lasted only as far as the first set of security doors.  As I followed the prison matron down the long, windowless hall, the reality of my situation began to leak in.  Like expert witnesses in a trial, the facts began to present themselves one-by-one, leading me to a verdict that I couldn’t bear to think about.
    First, there was my body.   I could still feel myself inhabiting it, but the pains I’d been feeling up until then (the shoes that pinched my feet – the sick, bloated feeling in my gut from the Bates burger) had vanished.  And other than the glass in my hair, there was no other evidence that I’d been hit by a car.
    “Keep moving,” the prison matron said.
    I obliged, though I moved slowly as I continued to ponder the evidence.  Besides my physical proof, there was the strange jail cell and the fact that I’d been allowed to keep my cell phone when, in a real prison, I was pretty sure I would have had to give up my personal possessions.  Lastly, there was the hallway I was now walking.  Not only was it the longest hallway I’d ever seen, but my tired legs made me realize that I was going steadily downhill.
    This place I was in, this anonymous bureaucratic building, was nothing like the terrifying images of damnation that the nuns had conjured up for me when I was in Catholic school, but I sure as hell wasn’t in heaven.
    Panic suddenly gripped me.  I stopped walking again, fear locking my joints like rigor mortis.  I pressed myself against the wall and started to cry.
    I was in hell.  That final place of punishment for the damned.  It would be worse than the strange jail cell with the bruiser cellmate.  Far worse.  I swore I could already feel the Devil’s pitchforks under my fingernails, and his fire blistering the soles of my feet.
    “Please,” I begged my guard.  It’s a good thing the hamburger was no longer making me