Written by guest author Jeremy Miller

This story is part of the project A Writer’s Shindig. Jolene Rice’s story is the third of 6 short stories written for the project. You can read more about our collaboration and read all the stories posted thus far at A Writer’s Shindig.

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15
I made sure I had time. I observed for a while. Got her routine. It wasn’t hard. Everything in prison is based around routine.

When her podmates were in the quilting area and she was in her room masturbating I came in. I’ve killed men jerking off before a few times, those are funny stories. It doesn’t work the other way. Not at all.

After quilting her podmates have a shift making mattresses, so I knew she’d be alone for at least three hours. I gave her a hotshot and settled in to wait.

I got to thinking if they make this story into a movie this is where they’d put in the montage of me killing her in increasingly cruel and usual and hilarious ways and her turning up still being alive. I wish I could do that in real life. Killing the same person multiple times is really boring.

Of course, if this was a movie the woman playing me would be much more attractive than I am. If movies have taught us anything it’s that women with perfect skin and D-cups are the best covert operatives.

My A-cups and I were in her room with her dead body for a while but not long enough to see anything happen. Why? The whole facility went on lockdown. You’re never supposed to be in another prisoner’s room according to the rules but it’s mostly unenforceable except when they do headcount.

When I got back to my pod the podmates were working on a puzzle. It’s the kind of thing I see around here regularly that is just wrong. It’s so mundane.

I’m not a puzzler. Puzzles aren’t my thing. I declined their invitation to join and headed for my room. My assigned buddy shook her head in prison mom disappointment.

“I know you think you’re the queen bitch of the world and nobody can hurt you but if you keep breaking bad with everyone someone’s going to get you eventually.”

“I don’t think I can’t be hurt, I have no illusions about being invincible. I’ve gotten my ass kicked plenty.”

“Then why do you act like this?”

“To thine own self be true.”

16
After just about enough time for five women to finish a puzzle the lockdown was lifted. In short order I saw the target sitting in her pod with her podmates shooting the shit. Very much alive, just like before.

Why the lockdown?

I don’t know if cigarettes are actually currency in men’s prisons, from what I’ve heard it’s evolved to be based on honeybuns and handjobs now, but I know that the main currency here is magazines.

I don’t remember the last time I saw a magazine outside of a doctor’s office before I came to prison but here they’re ubiquitous. Everyone (except me) has a collage on their wall of pictures they’ve cut out of magazines. It seems very juvenile to me which makes sense because the entire experience of being in prison is infantilizing. Everything you do is based on someone else telling
you what to do. Everything you have someone gave to you. Everything is provided for you.

The magazines were flying hot and heavy after lockdown was lifted as women tried to buy information about what happened. There were no details to be had. No matter how rich you were in magazines. This has never happened before. No matter how many magazines were spent nobody knew anything.

Prison is like a small town, everybody knows everyone’s business. Even the guards’ business is common knowledge. When you’re in prison there’s not much to do other than snoop.

This time nobody knew anything.

I kill the target and finally I get time to observe what happens after and we go on lockdown? First thing I thought was “this can’t be a coincidence” which is wrong because of course it could be a coincidence.

But and this is a Kim Kardashian sized butt, the timing is very suspicious.

Curiouser and curiouser.

17
I got sent to solitary again. Not for killing the target obviously. They put me in solitary because I’m not good at making mattresses.

I call bullshit. Discipline issues. Fine. Punishment. That makes sense. I’m just not good at sewing. How is solitary confinement going to help me learn to sew better?

Dr. K came to visit me under the guise of a health check. He said he couldn’t get me out this time, which is incorrect, he could, but I knew what he meant.

“I need your help on this one doc,” I told him. “Can you examine the target and figure out what her deal is?”

“What deal do you mean?” he asked warily.

“I’ve killed her several times in different ways and then there she is alive and well. What about Rasputin?” I asked.

“What about him?” he said, still utterly baffled by what I just laid on him.

“Didn’t they poison him and stab him and shoot him and beat him with clubs and run him over with a truck and blow him up with dynamite and he didn’t die?”

“Did they have trucks then?”

“Wasn’t he in World War One?”

We both looked at each other for a moment as we each realized we didn’t know anything about Rasputin.

“Maybe she’s like him. Just check her out.”

“Check her for being Rasputin?”

“You know what I mean,” I said, exasperated.

“I do actually, but I’m trying to point out how meaningless what you mean is. I can give her a physical. You know what shows up on a physical? Like five things. Unless a patient has symptoms to give the doctor an idea of what to look for medicine isn’t good at finding random anomalies. Especially medicine in a prison. You know what equipment I have access to here? A
box of Little Mermaid band-aids and some tampons.”

“You’re here to help me man, give me something, speculate, use that big brain of yours, what do you think might be going on?”

“Are you familiar with simulation theory?”

“Sure, like the 13th Floor, it’s bullshit.”

He scowled. “The 13th Floor? You mean the Matrix?”

“I never saw the Matrix, I don’t like Jennifer Lopez.”

“What?”

“A friend of mine worked in a recording studio and he said Jennifer Lopez was a bitch to all the staff there so I don’t watch her movies or listen to her music or buy her line of wigs.”

“Jennifer Lopez wasn’t in the Matrix! She had nothing to do with the Matrix. Keanu Reeves was in the Matrix!”

“You’re thinking of Speed.”

“Keanu Reeves was in Speed but he was also in the Matrix!”

“No, you’re thinking of Ghost Rider.”

“That was Nicholas Cage!”

“Why are you getting so upset?”

“I . . .” he stopped and looked around like he forgot where he was for a second.

“I don’t know actually. Probably because I’m in a women’s prison.”

“You aren’t taking advantage?”

“That is disgusting, immoral, and illegal. I resent the implication.”

“Disgusting, Immoral, and Illegal, that would be a good album name.”

18
One time the girl from the Hunger Games went on Conan and talked about her butt plugs a lot. Which is neither here nor there, but I wanted to remind everyone about that. She was in this movie called Red Sparrow where she was a sexy sex spy who sexed everyone in sexy sex sex times and only sex could save the day.

My team gives me low marks in the Red Sparrow category which is not 100% fair. Am I the best operative to seduce a specific target? Probably not. But the idea that I am not anyone’s type is incorrect. I’m a bunch of dudes’ type. That type is sad flabby balding weirdos for the most part, but that type exists.

Point being that it wasn’t that hard for me to seduce the guard who looks like Miley Cyrus if she was an Asian man.

“So what’s the deal with [NAME REDACTED]?” I asked him as he was struggling to buckle his belt.

“Huh?” he dumbed dumbly. “What do you care?”

“Just tell me bro.”

“Why would I do that?” he laughed, “you weren’t that good.”

“Why? Because you just committed statutory rape. Inmates legally can’t consent to sex, which I’m certain you know. I’ll tattle on you if you don’t do what I say.”

He tried to bow up on me because of course he did, men don’t like getting threatened by women (most of them anyway, see above) and especially men who are used to being the ones doing the abusing don’t like being threatened.

I punched him in the thigh. Which might sound funny but it’s not. Not the way I do it. He fell down with a squawk like a kicked chicken, grabbing at his paralyzed leg.

“Hurts doesn’t it? You’ll be alright in a minute. Probably. Nerve damage is always possible. What was your name? Gorg? Edom? Something short. Here’s what I know about men, Puck, they’re like dogs, they come in three main types. I don’t know what the ratio is but most of them are in these two categories, dogs that are literally all bark and won’t bite even when you smack
them around, and the dogs that bark and bark and bark but will bite if you force them to. The third kind is the smallest category, the true predators. The ones who get put down after biting a kid’s face off at a birthday party. And another thing I know is you’re one of the first two kinds. Which means I don’t have to worry about you. You follow me?”

I guess he didn’t because he lunged at me from his one knee position. Which is a pretty bad position to try and lunge at someone from. I stepped back and stomped his head into the floor. I think he understood after that.

We’ll see.

19
I went to solitary again for assaulting a guard. I misjudged Kip or Ned or Saul, whatever his name is. He tattled on me before I could tattle on him. I was hoping Dr. K was going to come visit me again because I really need someone to bounce ideas off at this point.

Instead guards came to take me to see the warden. They call her the prison superintendent but that’s what she is.

She looks like every mousy naggy female character from a male driven comedy. Not the one who’s secretly hot without her glasses and eventually learns to “loosen up” and gives Jason Segel
a blowjob under the table in the last scene, the other one, the one who gets shit on by an elephant and everyone laughs. Because she’s not hot. And therefore the object of derision.

She made a big show of waiting until we were alone in her office before she leaned forward and stage whispered.

“I know why you’re here.”

“I should hope so, you’re the warden.”

She shook her head theatrically. “No, I know why you’re really here.”

“I’m sure you do,” I drawled.

She cupped her hands around her mouth. She was acting like she was in an old movie where people worried about lip readers.

“When a person closes up completely, trying to guaranty themselves against their own obliteration, all they do is die a different kind of death. Like a piece of fossilized wood.”

That was weird enough that I started paying attention.

“Are you saying that someone here is already dead in some way?”

She moved her hands to not only cover her mouth but to cover most of her face. “Immortality?

What does that word even mean? There is one universal truth. All that exists will die. Everything has something against which it has no defense, for most of us it’s time, or disease, for others you need to get creative.”

“Sure, the right tool for every job, do you have anything useful to tell me or are you just going to say creepy shit? Is this a Castle Rock situation? Are you playing the role of the guy from Whiplash? Is the person we’re talking about Bill Skarsgård in this situation? Was he the Antichrist? I never watched the last few episodes.”

She tilted her head like my aunt’s stupid parrot used to do when it started mimicking her gross sex noises. “Endings aren’t the punishment, they’re the mercy. It’s the ones who keep circling the drain forever that you need to worry about.”

“Alright, fuck this.”

20
In shows when the head honcho is taken hostage they always yell to their minions, “Take the shot, don’t worry about me!” Superintendent Sally had a different take on hostage situations. She screamed, “Do whatever she wants!” when I drug her out of her office with a knife at her throat.

Do prison guards have access to guns? They must, right? Locked away somewhere? But I’ve never heard of prisoners having guns even when they take control of the prison.

I was trapped in the hallway outside of the main office area but I wasn’t trying to get out.

“Bring me [NAME REDACTED]!” I yelled through the door at the Deputy Superintendent (big dude with a giant head, looked like a cross between Edward James Olmos and Jimmy Smits with just a splash of Jeff Goldblum) and the gaggle of office people and guards with him.

“We can’t do that,” he said over the speaker thing.

Superintendent Sally shrieked back “Yes you can, I give you permission!”

I’m certain she’s wrong about that, their procedure is surely not to give the hostage taker more hostages, but she was trying her cowardly best to convince them. They tried to talk me down and eventually caved in, which I’m sure means they should all be fired. Eventually they brought Her into the hallway.

I chucked Superintendent Sally aside and grabbed the target. She struggled a little but like the other times I killed her it didn’t matter. I would have felt sorry for her if she wasn’t so fucking annoying, not dying and all.

I pushed her up against the glass Edward Jimmy Goldblum and his crew were behind.

“Check this out,” I said as I stabbed the shit out of her. And I mean good.

They rushed in to try and grab me at that point, but I had Sally around the throat again to ward them off.

I pointed with the bloody knife. “Just watch, she’s going to get up in a minute, or there’s going to be a flash of light and she’s going to be alive again, something freaky is going to happen and I want you all to see it.”

“She needs medical attention!”

“She’s fucking dead brother, I stabbed her in the brainstem like a thousand times. Stay where you are or the warden gets it! Just watch her. Something is going to happen. Any minute now. It’s going to be something, trust me. Something with quantum realms or clones or different dimensions or something. Just watch. She’s not really dead.”

“Any minute now,” I said five minutes later.

“I don’t know how long it takes,” I admitted ten minutes later.

“It might take an hour,” I said half an hour later, “but I know it doesn’t take longer than that, this isn’t the first time I’ve killed her.”

I’m not going to say that I’m such an ice-cold piece of work that nothing can shock me, but
there’s not a lot that really throws me off guard. Having said that, when the guards and administrative people parted and Dr. K walked up I was thoroughly flabbergasted.

“What the hell?” I asked, because, what the hell?

He glanced at the dead woman and the gallons of blood on and around her.

“Well . . . we’venever had anyone do that before. That was certainly . . . a choice.”

21
We retired to 2 Scoops Ice Cream because while a women’s prison isn’t so bad they don’t have ice cream. Dr. K was giving me looks like when someone is picking out a new puppy, he was looking for something but he didn’t know what it was himself.

“Why didn’t you try talking to her?” he asked.

“You know, that never occurred to me,” I admitted, sucking on 2 Scoops signature Jail Break Shake.

“That’s usually what people try eventually.”

I shrugged. “So how’d you do it? Clones? Did you clone her?”

“That’s need-to-know information. And I don’t mean that in the sense of information that you only get told because you need it to complete an objective, I mean that you only get that information if you need to know it or you’ll go insane because you’ve seen something inexplicable based on all logic and reason.”

I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t need to know.”

Dr. K’s smile was what they call “beauteous” and that’s something because he’s not a beautiful man.

“You have no idea how happy that makes me. That’s the final test. People who need to know, they can’t be trusted. They’re too invested. You can’t count on them. Do you realize what a rare bird you are?”

“Yeah,” I said, eying a kid’s cookie ice cream sandwich and wondering if I should have ordered that instead. Or also. “So what’s the pitch? I passed your Kobayashi Maru hot dog challenge and what? Is this some Men Who Stare At Goats shit? I get to be a man in black? Area 51? The elite of the elite of the elite? Assassinating wizards? Vampires? Something even weirder?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Fortean events, unexplained human phenomena, cryptozoology, out of place objects, whatever you want to call it, there’s more going on than you’ve been exposed to so far. If you want the job, if you want to join the team, you can learn things that very few people know, that even fewer people should know. And if not, if you decide that it’s not for you, no hard
feelings.”

“No hard feelings meaning you’d kill me?”

“No need to make a decision right away, you can have until you’re done with your ice cream to think about it.”

“Fair.”

The End