The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld Page B

lying in torn clumps on the floor, each clump a seaweed strand headed with little white follicles. My walls are smeared with my blood, which looks weak and watery even to me, and I ricochet off the walls again and again as I hear him laugh.
    T he warden comes two days later. I’ve been sitting with the blanket over my head. The trays have fallen willy-nilly on the floor, spilling untouched food.
    â€œI heard what happened.” The warden stands outside my cell. “Striker’s an asshole.”
    They carried Striker off to the hole. It didn’t have anything to do with me. The guards don’t like shit. It has germs. When I first came here, one inmate shit-bombing another wasn’t such a big deal, but now, with all the hepatitis and AIDS and staph infections, the guards get mad when someone shit-bombs another.
    I keep my thin arms over my face under my blanket. I can feel the scabs starting to twitch where I tore out my hair. Now I know what it means when they say someone feels adrift, without moorings, when the most precious thing in life is gone.
    The warden sighs. “People can be assholes sometimes.”
    There is nothing left.
    â€œI bought something for you,” the warden says.
    The warden drops a small book with a white jacket through the slot. It is so new, I can smell the ink. The book falls as one stiff entity to the dirty stone floor. No pages flap, because the book has never been opened. The spine is unbroken.
    I have never seen a brand-new book. I peer under the blanket through what remains of my raggedy hair.
    The book has landed so the title is visible on the floor. The White Dawn it says.
    I cannot help myself. I scramble off my bunk to rescue it. It cannot lie on the befouled floor. I grab it with long yellow nails. I hold it tight to my chest, feeling the stiff gloss of the cover under my fingertips. The smell of new paper and ink is like heaven.
    My heart is beating, and now I know why they say beating like a drum. It is the drumming sound of blood running to all corners, flooding my body with the magic of the words inside. I scramble back on my cot and cover my head once again with the blanket, the book pressed against my thundering heart.
    I want to tell the warden thank you, but of course I can’t talk.
    â€œH ow are you, Mom?”
    This is what the lady always says when she visits her mom, and every time she says the word, it breaks her heart into pieces that she has to pick up in her hands and shove back in her chest.
    Her mom has dried crumbs on her lips and a vacant look in her eyes until she realizes it is her daughter. The lady takes her mom’s hand. It is cold, and she rubs it. Her mother wakes up to the world and starts complaining. This is what the aides say about her mom, too. She is a Grade A complainer.
    Today her mom wants to complain about another resident at her disability home. She believes that the resident stole the perfume the lady gave her for Christmas, eventhough the aides have told her a million times that no one stole your perfume, you used it all up. But her mother is like that. She perseverates, is the medical term, which is fancy talk for saying getting stuck in a hell of an annoying way.
    The lady listens to her mom talk and talk and talk and feels the old dull ache inside her. This is her mother—the one who gave birth to her, pushed her from her canal. Breast-fed her, she was told, until she was almost two. Loved her, in her own way. Fed her when reminded, cuddled her when she cried. Forgot her at the park. Never knew how to take her to a doctor. Misunderstood thermometer readings. Called the ambulance for colds but let broken bones go untreated. Couldn’t set an alarm clock so her daughter never got to school on time. Never bought a toothbrush or read her a book or cooked a recipe. But would hug and kiss her and loved her beyond all measure. All the usual stuff of growing up with a mom with an IQ of 69, the lady