Sweet Hell on Fire Read Free Page A

that come from? I went to bed skinny and woke up fat.” I rolled my eyes, and the other officer in the room clamped his mouth shut and buried his head in his arms on the desk as he shook with laughter. “I know what I look like and I don’t care what they think of me. Or you for that matter.”
    He looked at me. “You’re a woman. Of course you do.”
    I’d forgotten this guy believed that because I had a vagina, I wasn’t capable of concerning my little head with anything beyond my next pair of shoes and what I should make my man for dinner.
    I really didn’t care what the inmates thought of me. For someone’s opinion to matter, you have to give a shit about them. You have to care for someone’s words to hurt you. Some snaggle-toothed, illiterate ghetto rat doesn’t like looking at my ass? I’m certainly not going to cry about it. A thicker skin? I have an outer shell like the tiles of the space shuttle. Further, if I did care, that would mean I wanted to be attractive to the inmate.
    Yeah, I’d rather gargle with razor blades, thank you very much.
    I got on the PA system. “Attention in the cell house. The OIC is irritated by your barnyard sounds. I, however, find them amusing. But Mamma already knows what sounds the cow makes. Can anyone tell me what sound a horse makes?”
    The cell house erupted in laughter, breaking the tension that had been building from the interaction between me and the inmate. Whenever something like that went down, it was never just about the officer and the inmate. So keeping a situation at the lowest level of escalation was important.
    He snatched it away from me. “This isn’t your cell house, little girl. You can’t just come in here and—”
    “And what?” I snatched it back. “I can’t come in here and do my job? Why don’t you give it to me in writing that you told me not to search cells?”
    His mouth hung open, a rusty hinge swaying back and forth in the wind. He couldn’t say anything to that. Some of the old-timers were tired and didn’t like to upset the status quo. But I wasn’t an old-timer and wasn’t tired. Whatever the inmate had hidden was something he wasn’t supposed to have. There were reasons for rules and reasons things were contraband. I was looking out for my fellow officers by getting that crap out of population. I was looking out for the inmates too.
    I was also building a reputation. Fair. Firm. Consistent. Not only was that my training, it’s what worked. Reputations are like trust. Hard to build, easy to shatter, and it doesn’t matter what the truth of the situation happens to be, only how the others perceive it.
    Women have to be harder in this environment. We’re seen as the weak link by both officers and inmates until we prove otherwise. Something as simple as doing my job went a long way for a solid reputation.
    Later, when I followed through searching his cell, I found the contraband he’d tried to hide. Not only did he have a baggie of weed under the clothes he’d pissed on, but he also had a joint in the toilet.
    But that wasn’t the important find.
    The important one was the seven steel rods that had been stolen from the metal-working shop and taped underneath his cell door.
    He was making shanks.
    I’d done the right thing demanding to search his cell. I also knew I was lucky he hadn’t gone for one of those steel rods and put it through my face when I’d ordered his door opened.
    After what had happened in the yard, it was also a sign that the shit was about to get deep.

Work seemed unnaturally quiet, and while I was sure something big was brewing, I admitted it could be just another day.
    Nothing happened. Everyone went home safe. That made it a good day above everything else.
    But there was no rest for the wicked.
    My husband and I had separated almost a year ago, and I lived with my parents. That hadn’t been an ideal situation at seventeen, let alone at thirty. I loved my parents, but we had different ideas about how