Inside These Walls by Rebecca Coleman Page A

lose. Clear as any other memory is the sight of him pacing the kitchen with the phone pressed to his ear, his damp floppy bangs grasped in his hand, grit caught in the sweat that shone on his arms. The weight of his body amplified itself in his heavy footsteps, and his voice was a hoarse and ragged edge of what it had once been. I’ll talk to Clinton Brand, he half-shouted, over and over. You want to talk to me, send him in. Send him right here. Clinton Brand .
    I scroll back. Picture the one before. The second-to-last Ricky.
    Sometimes, when he had worked the graveyard shift at the Circle K, I would come to the house after work and find him fast asleep on his mattress on the floor. I’d slip beneath the covers and find him already nude, because he had known I was coming. After hours asleep, the space under the covers was as heated as an animal’s den. I would run my hands all over his buttery skin, drinking in the scent of him: warm and alive and male, a body that my own body wanted to pull close, hold tightly. Not cologne or shampoo or soap—I loved the smell that ran beneath all those things. The one that completed a circuit in my brain, made a tingle of electricity dance down my spine.
    Soon enough he would awaken and turn to me. Unbutton my blouse, run a warm, clay-roughened hand down my belly. Roll onto his back and relax into my touch along the sparse hair of his chest and simple flat plane of his stomach, and then the part of him I’d first feared, then loved. When I wrapped my hand around him he purred deep in his throat like one of our cats.
    It’s what I miss hopelessly. How perfect the fit of his body into mine. The way he moved as we both grappled for what was just out of reach, his arousal built to feed and vanquish mine, and mine his. We could make each other desperate for what we alone had created, and then destroy it together.
    There is no substitute, not inside nor outside these walls, for a lover who wants you.
    I roll onto my stomach and keep it as quiet as I can.
    * * *
    In the morning the regular wakeup call sounds, and we all rise and head back to work. I return to the drawing of Guernica with intense focus, and Shirley even bestows a compliment for the speed and quality of my work. The hours seem to vanish behind me, and before I know it I’m back in the yard, squinting in the sunlight for the first time in days.
    I walk the edge of the fence, clicking my tongue, looking for Clementine. The other inmates, gang members sitting at the picnic tables, watch me the way patrons of a café watch a homeless person mumbling down the sidewalk. The other inmates here have never been fond of my indifference to making friends. Even on the outside it was always difficult for me, and in here it’s all the more perilous. People snitch about petty violations, they get transferred to other prisons, they get released. An alliance that was very valuable can become a liability if the other person is unceremoniously taken away. There’s a rule that we can’t receive mail or visits from anyone who was released in the past year, so friendships, even the most carefully cultivated ones, die. But it’s just as well. If I were spontaneously pardoned for my crimes, I’d walk away from all this and never look back. Except for Janny, whom I would never abandon, I wouldn’t maintain my loyalty to friends on the inside or cling to my identity as a former inmate. I’d shed it like a dirty snakeskin and try never to think of it again.
    Clementine is nowhere to be found. Dejected, I walk back to the other side of the yard, then pace back and forth near the C.O.s for a while to work the days of laziness out of my muscles. It’s a very hot day, and I suppose the cat must have been smart enough to find shelter. Sweat trickles down my temples and catches in the wispy bits of my hair flying out from my ponytail.
    Several days’ worth of mail awaits me when I return to my cell. There is a letter from Emory Pugh, my copy of the