EMMA

The buzz cracked through the silence like a blade, sharp and familiar. I opened my eyes to the gray ceiling above me, already bracing for another day.

Months had passed since the sentencing, but the routine hadn't changed. Wake up, stand for count, and shuffle forward in the rhythm the Bureau wanted us to learn by heart.

I had been assigned to the low-security side of the facility. The camp was just across the fence. Minimum security, dormitory bunks, with women clustered together like college roommates who had made the worst possible life choices. But the Bureau of Prisons had decided I needed more oversight. Too much of a flight risk, they said. Too practiced at disappearing. So instead of a dormitory, I had a two-person cell with a steel door that shut out the world every night. More counts. More restrictions. Less space to breathe.

I swung my legs down from the top bunk and went about my morning routine. I folded my blanket military-tight, splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth with a flimsy commissary toothbrush, and pulled on the tan uniform that fit like cardboard. When the lock slid open, I was already at the door, standing straight, waiting for the CO's eyes to pass over me and move on.

My cellmate, Gloria Simmons, "Mama G" to everyone here, was already gone, off to the kitchen where she ruled like a queen. The women respected her because she made the food edible, and that alone was enough to give her the quiet authority of a warden within the unit.

I remembered my early days when I first arrived, disoriented, walking through intake like a ghost wearing someone else's skin. Orientation had been a blur. Rules that seemed to multiply the moment you thought you learned them, schedules handed out, warnings about what not to do. But nothing really stuck. I was still hollowed out, still moving on autopilot, still thinking about Jake's cold eyes, Eric's guilt, my parents' absence. I might as well have been walking underwater.

That was when Mama G sized me up with her sharp eyes, sharper tongue, and gray hair pulled back in a no-nonsense bun. She was the kind of woman who carried herself like she had seen it all, and maybe she had. My first impression was that she ran our cell like she ran her kitchen—tidy, orderly, and with absolutely no tolerance for weakness or excuses.

She caught me sitting on my bunk one night, staring at the floor like the weight of the walls might crush me. She didn't waste words.

"It's okay to get knocked down," she had said. "We're all made of bones that can be broken, flesh that can be cut. But you got two options here, girl. Stay knocked down and let the time do you, or start doing the time and get your shit together."

That was it. A line thrown like a life raft in an ocean I hadn't realized I was drowning in. It landed hard, and for the first time since I had been locked up, I started to listen.

Mama G taught me the rhythms, when to speak and when to shut up, how to keep the cell spotless for inspections, and how to avoid the women who would test you just to see if you would bend or break. She taught me to breathe through count time, to keep my head down in the yard, and to learn who really ran things.

And I listened. I had always been good at listening. Good at learning the angles. That skill had kept me alive before, and now, it was helping me survive here.

Count finished. The CO barked the order, and we filed out in a line, all of us in the same tan uniforms, all of us with the same weary gait of people who had been doing this too long.

The chow hall carried the sour tang of bleach and the heavy steam of overcooked oatmeal. Steel trays clattered, plastic cups hit the tables with dull thuds, and the air hummed with the low murmur of tired conversations. Breakfast was powdered eggs, toast stiff enough to pass for cardboard, and coffee that tasted like it had been scraped off the bottom of a scorched pot. Still, Mama G did what she could, making sure the women always had something worth putting on their trays.

She was already seated at her usual spot near the end of a long table, apron and head cover set aside. Her posture was regal, her tray neat, her fork moving with deliberate precision. Even here, she carried herself like a general, no nonsense, commanding respect.

She only ever sat to have her own food after she had made certain everything was running the way it should. When her eyes found me, her mouth curved into what passed for her idea of a smile, something caught between amusement and a warning, a reminder that she saw more than she let on.

"Morning, sunshine," she said as I slid onto the bench across from her.

"If by sunshine you mean fluorescent lights and burnt coffee, then sure," I muttered.

Mama G chuckled, shaking her head. "Eat your eggs, girl. You'll need the protein if you plan on surviving another day in here."

I rolled my eyes, dropping my tray across from hers. "If you can even call this protein."

She lifted a brow. "Don't complain. You should've tasted the slop before I got here. Trust me, I'm a blessing."

"Modest too," I shot back, and for just a moment, I almost forgot where I was.

Around us, the table was filled with women I had grown familiar with over the months. Not friends, exactly—friend was too soft a word in a place like this—but women whose stories I had come to know in fragments.

There was Lena, mid-thirties, serving eight years for wire fraud, who always tucked packets of sugar into her sleeve for later. Sharon, a former nurse locked up on prescription trafficking charges, who carried herself with clinical calm even when the COs yelled. And Marisol, a few years younger than me, in for drug charges. She kept a photo of her baby girl folded tight in her pocket, edges fraying from being touched too often.

Nobody judged here. We didn't have to. The walls already judged us enough. We were all paying for our sins, some small, some catastrophic, all of them heavy.

"Library today?" Mama G asked, breaking my thoughts.

"Every day now." I sipped the coffee and winced. "Better than sanitation. My hands finally stopped smelling like bleach."

"Count your blessings." She smirked. "You'd last two days in my kitchen before begging them to ship you to Alcatraz."

I gave her a look, and she laughed, low and husky, the sound roughened by years of cigarettes and steel-gray mornings like this.

After breakfast, we scattered toward our assignments. Work detail was the spine of prison life, and I had been rotated through all of them in those first months. I learned how to scrub floors until they shone, how to fold sheets so precisely the COs had nothing to write me up for, and how to type reports that didn't belong to me. Each assignment had its rhythm, its own little misery.

But eventually, they found my fit. The library.

It was quiet there, almost peaceful. A room lined with shelves of worn paperbacks, outdated magazines, and legal books whose spines had been cracked too many times. It wasn't much, but it was enough.

I spent mornings shelving books, afternoons at the desk checking out dog-eared romance novels or thick legal texts to women who swore they were going to file their own appeals. Sometimes, I volunteered to help. A few worked toward their GEDs, and I would sit with them at the tables, walking them through math problems or grammar drills. Others wanted help writing legal letters, appeals, or even just letters home.

It wasn't freedom, but it felt useful. It gave me something that wasn't just survival.

That morning, I was organizing a stack of books when a younger inmate named Kayla tapped me on the shoulder. She couldn't have been more than twenty-two, her hair pulled into messy braids, anxiety written all over her face.

"Uh... can you help me with this?" she asked, sliding a GED prep book onto the table. A page filled with fractions and decimals stared up at me. Something simple if you had been to college, but daunting if you hadn't finished high school.

I sat down across from her, picking up the pencil she had abandoned. "Alright," I said softly. "Show me where you got stuck."

She leaned forward, chewing her lip, and I walked her through it step by step. Fractions to decimals, decimals to percentages. Her brow furrowed, but I saw the moment something clicked. Her eyes brightened, just a little.

"Like that?" she asked.

"Exactly like that." I pushed the paper back toward her. "Now you try it."

Her grin was quick, fleeting, but it stayed with me.

For a moment, I wasn't a prisoner. I wasn't a thief. I wasn't a woman waiting for the next count, the next chain, the next locked door. For a moment, I was just Emma, helping someone figure out a math problem.

The rest of the day blurred into its usual rhythm. Lunch in the chow hall. Another count. Time in the common room where women gathered around card tables, shuffling and slapping down hands with the kind of focus that made hours disappear.

Sometimes I played, letting them win more often than not. Old habits die hard. I was still a con artist, and a poker face had always been my trade. Most days, though, I kept to the sidelines with a book or a styrofoam cup of instant coffee. It tasted like sludge, but the caffeine was enough to make me forgive it. I had learned how to ignore the bitterness, to sip slowly, to treat it like an anchor against the monotony.

The yard came in the afternoon, a rectangle of cracked pavement and chain-link, with a patch of sky that always looked too small, too far away. Some women walked laps or played basketball. Some clustered in pairs, trading whispers.

I sat on a bench, face tilted toward the sun, eyes closed. The weak warmth of early winter tried to seep into my bones. For a moment, I just let myself be, remembering that warmth still existed and pretending that I wasn't boxed in, that I wasn't a number in prison-issued tan.

It was in these quiet moments that my mind wandered where I didn't want it to go.

Jake.

His name alone had the power to burn through me like acid. I tried not to linger, tried to train myself the way Mama G had told me once, "Don't let ghosts eat your air."

But sometimes he came anyway. His voice, his hands, his steady presence. And then the way he looked at me that night, like I had broken something sacred.

I told myself I hoped he had found happiness again. Maybe he had someone else by now, someone whole, someone clean, someone who didn't leave ruin in her wake. The thought should have comforted me. Instead, it hollowed me further.

So, I forced myself to pivot. To think of Eric.

He came every week without fail, his jaw set in that stubborn way, like he believed he could carry both our burdens if he just clenched hard enough. I lived for the hugs at the start and end of those visits. They were the only touches in my week that weren't cold, weren't about a search or a set of shackles. Just arms around me, human and warm.

Alycia came too whenever her work let her, her soft hazel eyes a reminder that love could exist without condition. Their visits were the only moments I felt tethered to something that wasn't loss.

Eric and I had worked out a system, a way to slip messages to our parents in letters the COs couldn't quite crack. He passed them along, and somewhere out there, they were read. I never asked how our parents reacted, never asked where they were hiding. None of that mattered. What mattered was that they knew I was still breathing. For me, that was enough.

There was something else that kept me afloat. It began quietly—a stub of pencil from commissary, a scrap of paper folded into my pocket after a library shift. One night, when sleep wouldn't come and my hands ached for purpose, I started to draw. A tree took shape first, then a half-remembered face, then a window cracked open to nowhere.

It wasn't much. Not compared to what I used to paint. But it was something, and in here, something was everything.

I didn't expect anyone to notice, but they did.

"Can you draw my kid?" a woman had asked once, sliding a photo across the table like contraband. Others followed. Husbands, daughters, mothers lost on the outside.

They offered me ramen packets, instant coffee, and shampoo from commissary. I always shook my head. I didn't want anything. The drawing itself was what I needed. The feel of graphite against paper, the momentary escape of watching a face take shape where there had been only blankness.

Soon, some of the younger women started hovering nearby. Watching me. Asking if I could show them how. And one afternoon, I did. Just a quick lesson, showing a girl how to sketch the shape of a hand without making it look like a claw. She laughed when she managed it, eyes lighting up in a way I hadn't seen in months.

That laugh stuck with me.

It made me wonder. Maybe, just maybe, there could be more. A program. Nothing big, just a cleared storage room, a handful of pencils, a space to let women sit together and put something down on paper that wasn't regret.

One night, I even drafted it out. An outline tucked into my notebook, including schedules, supply lists, and goals. I wrote the words "Art Program Proposal" across the top like it mattered, like anyone would ever read it.

Then I shoved it away in my closet. Because who was I kidding? The Bureau of Prisons wasn't about to waste taxpayer money on teaching a bunch of felons how to shade faces, paint sunsets, or make sense of their feelings through paint and charcoal. Beauty didn't belong here. Reflection didn't belong here.

But still... the idea lingered.

Sometimes, late at night, I would lie on my top bunk staring at the ceiling, my hands smudged faintly with graphite, and let myself imagine it. A room full of women, not as inmates, but as creators, for a few hours, at least. A place where the past didn't weigh as heavily and the future wasn't a cage.

Tonight wasn't any different.

Mama G snored faintly in the lower bunk. I sighed quietly, bracing myself for darkness, and at 10 on the spot, the lights clicked out. Darkness swallowed the cell, and reality folded back in. I closed my eyes and told myself the same thing I always did.

Tomorrow was just another day...