Muse and Mischief

After breaking her rule to protect another trans girl, T265 got more work and less sleep for her her reward. After threatening The Spire the CO ordered her to clean the Octagon after lights out. This was why she didn’t get involved…

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It was during her third year that T265 realized that scrubbing the floor to the beat of a song made the punishment tolerable. Already through the first act of her favorite musical, she had only hit the quarter mark of her section. 

It had to be off-brand canned ravioli night. Her frustration continued to grow as the scrubbing on the other end of the Octagon kept fucking up her rhythm. The fact that T316 was nearly finished didn’t help matters either.

The Octagon, much like the camp, was divided into four quadrants separated by thick concrete walls, marred with blood stains. Each one was designed to feed one thousand prisoners at a time, in theory. Sometimes the CO’s were not as diligent at moving people through so others could eat. 

The Born Agains, of course, always got in first and were offered additional servings. There were too many times to count where many would only get scraps, if anything at all.

T265 was able to eat that night, though the bucket that reeked of bleach turned her stomach each time she rinsed the brush. With the amount of dried sauce on the floor the chances of keeping her dinner grew slim. 

She used to love cleaning. The rhythm of the scratching brush drew her back to Saturday mornings, when she and her wife Cassie, would dance around the living room to their cleaning playlist. Cassie would sweep and mop the floors while T265 would clean the kitchen. Doing the dishes was always an opportunity for T265 to let her mind wander into fantastical worlds of make-believe.

Those times were gone. As much as she tried to push them out and focus on the rhythm of the scrubbing, her mind wandered back. The reverberation of Cassie’s laugh haunted her to the point of waking the deep pit of longing T265 worked so hard to suppress. It longed to be relished again. 

The brush ceased its rhythm and rested. Cassie’s plea to stay behind with her echoed in her memory. It took thirty minutes to convince her to go through airport security, but she made it out. That was the important thing. T265 sat on a bench in that terminal, utterly destroyed at how quickly the United States turned.

She brought the brush back to life, the rhythm resumed, and her mind sank into a different, familiar circle that drowned her for the first few months after she was thrown into this hell. She should have gotten her passport updated sooner. They should have left the country sooner, but they had too much trust in those elected into power. 

After the election, T265’s mind went wild with worst-case scenarios that Cassie assured her were too outrageous to happen. Until they did. Looking back, it was too easy to see how all the dominoes lined up.

Tucked deep into a spending bill was one amendment out of hundreds that redefined what constituted treason. With all their eyes on the atrocities of the immigration purge, election conspiracies, and the war, its broad language seemed benign enough to not be concerned. 

Once the bill passed, it took just one signature to make every queer person in the country an enemy of the state. Defying the gender roles established by the government became treason and made her hunted. Some days T265 wished they had just applied the death penalty. 

Even she didn’t know about the camps until she got caught sneaking across the border into Mexico. The Mexican soldiers should have just shot her on the spot instead of handing her back, but they made a deal to protect their people, or so they thought.

Thoughts of death didn’t surprise her anymore. Fantasies about dying far outweighed any about escaping alive; dying was at least possible. It wasn’t something she could do herself, though, hopeless as she was, her heart was too kind for that. 

The warden had specific beliefs about suicide, one of those being that it is a failing on the community. Punishment for killing herself would fall on everyone in her barracks, and she couldn’t bring herself to reason a way to feel okay about it. 

Instead, she hoped for The Horseman, the boogeyman of the camp, who claimed the lives of prisoners and wrote their numbers on the walls in their blood.

“Hey,” the sultry southern drawl disrupted T265’s rumination.

“What?” she asked, annoyed, and set the brush down to see T316, a hispanic T who did not match the voice, perched on the table above. The fatigue her rhythm kept at bay slithered back into her bones.

“You helped Runt today.” T316 drummed her thick fingers on the metal table and the hollow cadence filled the air until she continued, “Why?”

“That isn’t her name.” T265 returned to scrubbing.

“No,” T316 said and inspected her cuticles. “It isn’t, but I call her that now.” She leaned over the edge of the table. “What should I call you?”

“T265,” she grumbled while struggling with a persistent splatter of dried sauce.

“Hmm, don’t care for the numbers.” T316 slid her hand in front of T265’s face. “Friends call me EmCee.”

“Didn’t take you for a Born Again,” T265 quipped.

“Bitch please, my body is my temple.” EmCee laughed and slid onto the bench. “I like you. You got spunk.” She leaned down and whispered. “Think I’ll call you Spunky Brewster.”

“Please don’t.”

“What’s your name then?” EmCee lowered her voice further and continued, “Your real name.”

T265 sat up and shook the brush in the bucket. “So you can rat me out to the COs?”

“Go rat on me then. I told you mine first.” EmCee shook her head with a healthy level of sass and her eyes all wide. She waited a moment for a reaction, and when she got none, her expression went serious. “Look, I seen you around. You lonely, and that ain’t healthy in here.”

“I keep my head down.”

“Honey you are so far down you in China.”

“Racist much.”

“Bitch do you know where you are?” EmCee laughed with her whole body.

T265 was unable to stifle a smile.

“There we go,” EmCee cooed. “Look babycakes, you did Runt a solid. That makes you good people and I take care of good people.” EmCee reached into the bucket of bleach water and took out the brush. She crawled down onto the floor next to T265. She nodded her head toward the bench. “Go on, get.”

The absence of the pressure of concrete surged pain into T265’s knees when she pushed herself off the ground. Her body melted into the bench and leaned against the table. Exhaustion begged her to close her eyes right there and the rhythmic scrape of EmCee’s efforts coaxed her as well.

“You never stopped to wonder why you haven’t seen a CO in here, have you?” EmCee asked.

The statement sent T265 straight up, and scanning the room. Not another soul in sight. ”How did—”

“One of the Closets taken a shine to me, so I gets all sorts of favors,” EmCee explained as she made quick work of another group of stains.

“Closets?” T265 asked.

“There’s three of them, in this quad at least,” EmCee chuckled. “They’re discreet enough for the CisHets, but not for me. This one’s wandering eye was all it took for me to clock him.” She hummed a random tune and smacked her lips. “Stick it to the man any way I can,” she sang.

“I never noticed them,” T265 said.

“Cause you got your head down all the time.” EmCee sat up and looked her in the eye. “You’d be amazed what you find when you wake up and look around.”

“What else do you notice?” T265 wasn’t even sure why she was still entertaining this conversation, but the break was helping. There was something about EmCee that was comfortable though. 

Maybe it’s the fact that she was the first person to treat her like a human being since getting there. Well, since T113 anyway, but she wasn’t friendly as much as she was the harbinger of caution.

“I know you been here longer than me and I been here two years,” EmCee answered.

“Why do your friends call you EmCee?”

“You know what they do when we use our real names in here.”

“What does it mean then?”

“It was my stage name.” She sighed an air of wistful remembrance before she tapped T265’s knee. “What’s your name honey?”

“I…” T265 paused. Every bit of common sense told her not to break this boundary, but so much of her missed having a connection like this to another person. Maybe it was trust or maybe it was the weight of five years of loneliness, but something inside T265 chose to take a risk that night.

“Amelia,” she whispered, and a wall in the glass house she built to separate herself shattered. She hadn’t even thought of the name in years, let alone spoken it. Even now, it felt abominable to use it in such a way.

EmCee smiled with such warmth; it was a lot like Cassie used to before she had to leave. EmCee put her hand on T265’s and squeezed. 

“Mine’s Candy. I’m going to call you Sport,” she whispered. Her eyes shimmered in the fluorescent light of the dining hall. “Every time I do, you know that I am using your real name.” She set the scrub brush down on the ground. “I’m going to hug you now, I’m a hugger.”

T265 sat still, and the sensation of EmCee’s arms was different, foreign, and more like a hazy memory than anything real. T265’s hands fumbled until they clasped her arms around EmCee’s back. When her head rested on EmCee’s shoulder for the briefest moment, it was like they were friends greeting each other in the outside world. 

The steel bars, cement walls, and razor wire were nowhere to be found, and it was just the two of them in a world of freedom.