He puts his hand out to caress her throat, not the bloody one, but the one with the thumb gone. She can’t feel the thumb gone.
She kisses him. He has an iguana’s tongue. Her body shivers with love, by the fistfuls. When he leaves her, her memory turns into blood.
What is my body made of, she asks, that there is no sweat inside.
She stands naked on the street. She asks each man she sees to pay her her debt. But they say they owe her nothing.
The owl is perched on the stairs.
“I’ve come to protect this woman,” he says.
But he turns into a cock, and descends. A lemon between his legs. She has made the juice run.
I caress his throat. I kiss him.
PART FOUR
1
I lay on my back watching a female cockroach climbing the wall. An eggsack was hanging from its ass. Some people like to squash that kind. I didn’t like to squash any of them, because of that white stuff coming out. Sometimes I’d think of pulling the eggsack out before it was time to come out. Not with my hands, but with tweezers. I liked to watch them copulate, the male coming in through the ass, hanging onto the female’s back. I’d think of how small their genitals must be.
The cell had a basin for washing up, but I had to go out to go to the toilet. I thought of cockroach piss, then I thought of him. An erection. He took my hand and put it on his thing. “It’s your fault,” he said. “You did it.”
“I’m not sorry,” I answered. He asked if I wanted to play. I said yes. But then we were turning forward rolls and backward rolls like I used to do on those long mattresses in gym class. And then we were using ropes for swings, and we were naked, and the ropes cut into our asses. I could see a red cut along his ass. I couldn’t see my own, but I felt it burning, stinging, blood on the tips of my fingers. I touched his. He was bleeding too, but he was laughing. I didn’t want to, but I started laughing too. He raised his arms and I kissed him inside his armpits. He asked, “What next?” I smiled but didn’t answer. Then I said, “You never know.” He watched me in silence, then he said, “Let’s play again.” I scratched his behind.
“Have you started yet?” he asked. “No, I haven’t started yet.”
“We could rub asses and become blood what-ya-ma-call-its,” he said, laughing.
I hugged myself, my hands inside my armpits. I was bleeding again.
“I don’t like a woman bleeding, it’s nasty,” he said.
“Get up close to me, honey, it helps the cramps.” But he wouldn’t. He turned away instead.
He did it while I was sleeping. I was bleeding but he went ahead and did it. His eyes were blood-colored like the eyes of those men who work in metal factories drilling holes in things with their visors on to help protect their eyes. Then I woke up and told him to hurry up and do it, but he took his time. He went in slow and came out slow. But still it was so good. Then he got dressed and went out for some reason he wouldn’t tell me and I just stayed laying there, with the towel under me to catch the blood, still feeling him, and then he came back. He told me to get dressed.
“I knew you’d be coming back,” I said.
“Get dressed anyway, I don’t like to see a woman always naked.”
“Honey, you in a trance or something?”
“What?”
The woman in the next cell was watching me. She had her hands on the bars and was peeking in at me. She was wearing the same kind of gray dress I was wearing.
“I said you sitting there like you in a trance. like one of them demon women or something. I can understand it, though. All em Dr Frauds coming in and out all the time, enough to drive anybody crazy, if they ain’t already. You seen yours yet?”
“What?”
“I call em all Dr Frauds. You know. But that’s all they do. Nothing. And get ten, twenty dollars a hour for it too. Except the state pays em. If I had to pay em, I wouldn’t pay em. I just stay crazy. Why they put you in here? What you do?”
“I killed a man.”
“Aw, that’s bad. I bet it was all in the papers, wasn’t it? They put me all in the papers. What’s your name? Maybe I read about you.”
“Medina.”
“Naw, I ain’t read about you, but seem I heard about it. Was he your nigger or somebody else’s?”
I didn’t answer.
“I bet I know how it happen. Your man messing around with some other woman I bet.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I knew it was. I coulda told you that. My name’s Elvira Moody. You ever read about me?”
“Naw.”
She frowned.
“What did you do?” I asked.
She smiled. Her teeth were crooked and rotten, but she didn’t look more than forty-five. “I sold some men some bad whiskey. It didn’t do nothing but make them sick. But the bastards called the law on me, and they put me in here. They put you in here for anything. You just look at them funny, they put you in here.”
“Aw.”
“You be awright, though. They didn’t execute you, did they? What I say is as long as you alive and fucking, you awright. You know, I heard on the radio where they talking about letting the men have women visitors, you know, sex visits. I don’t know if they mean crazy mens too, but they in prison too and need it too, don’t they. It’s all controversial now though and all these citizens callin in on the radio bitching about it and talking about how the good lord didn’t mean for
