screaming. I tensed my body. Milk was leaking from my breasts onto my shirt, soaking the front of it, and I ached so.
For a long time no one said anything. Then Teresa Lin, who had not spoken before, whispered, 'That window is open. I can see the stars.'
'Did they put a collar on you?' I heard myself ask. I sounded almost normal to my own ears. My voice was soft and low.
'What, this wide flat thing? They put one on me. I don't care. That window is open! I'm getting out of here!' And she began scrambling over people toward the window. Someone cried out in pain. Several voices cursed her.
'Everybody down,' I said. 'Down on your face!'
I could not see who obeyed me. I hoped all the sharers did. I wasn't sure what the collar would do to Teresa when she tried to get out the window. Maybe it was a fake. Maybe it wouldn't do anything. Maybe it would cut off her breath. Maybe it would collapse her, and cause her terrible pain.
She dived out of the window. She's a slim woman, quick and lithe like a boy. I looked up in time to see her arc out the window as though she expected to land on something soft or on water.
Then she began to scream and scream and scream. Allie Gilchrist got up, stepped to the window, and looked out at her. Then Allie tried to climb out to help her. The moment Allie touched the window, she screamed, then fell back into our prison room. Allie curled on her side against me, and grunted several times—hard, agonized grunts. I turned my face away, her pain twisting in my own middle. It helped that I hadn't been able to see Teresa once she fell below the level of the window, but I had already gotten a taste of her pain too.
Outside, Teresa went on screaming and screaming.
'No one's around,' Allie said, still gasping. 'She's just lying there on the ground, screaming and twisting. No one's even come out to see.'
************************************
She lay there all night We couldn't help her. Her voice deteriorated from full-throated screaming, the way any of us might scream in fear and pain, to hoarse terrible grunting. She didn't pass out—or rather, she did, but she kept corning to again and making her terrible noises.
Going near the door meant pain. Going to the window meant pain. Even if you didn't try to get out, just being there hurt, hurt bad. Diamond Scott volunteered to crawl around the floor, letting her own collar tell her what was forbidden. People complained when she crawled over them, but I asked them to put up with it and Di apologized and the complaints stopped. We were still human, still civilized. I wondered how long that would last.
'Someone's here!' Di said. She almost screamed the words. 'Someone's dead here!'
Oh, no. Oh, no.
'Who is it?' I asked.
'I don't know. She's cool. Not cold yet, but... I'm sure she's dead!'
I followed Di's voice, and spotted her silhouette, a darker shape in the darkness. She was moving more than the others, scrambling away from the body that she was sure must be dead.
Who was it?
Then, as I crawled toward the body, trying to be careful, trying not to hurt anyone, I had a feeling, a memory. I was afraid I knew who it was.
The body was sitting upright in a corner, against the wall. It was small—child-sized. It was a black woman's body—a black woman's hair, nose, mouth, but so small__
'Zahra?'
She had not answered when I called her before. She was a bold, outspoken little woman, and she would not have kept quiet in all this. She might have been the one to go out the window before poor Teresa... if she could have.
She was dead. Her body wasn't yet stiff, but it would be soon. It was cooling. It wasn't breathing. I took the small hands between mine and felt the ring that Harry had worked so hard to buy for her. He's old-fashioned, Harry is, even though he's my age. He wanted his wife to wear his ring so that no one would make a mistake. Back when Zahra was the most beautiful woman in our Robledo neighborhood, she was beyond his reach, married to another man. But when that man was dead and Harry saw his chance, he moved right in. They were so different—black and white, tiny and tall, street-raised and middle class. She was three or four years older than he was. None of it mattered. They had managed, somehow, to have a good marriage.
And now she was dead.
