Walking the Dog by Elizabeth Swados

an animal. She ate flesh. Everyone claimed Fits was for sure a transsexual. The stories were ferocious and intense. But she’d been here long enough to earn an absolutely unique place in the criminal hierarchy. Even the Royals and the stone-hard lifers were not certain who she was or what she’d done.
    One thing was clear though—you did not provoke Fits. She’d never strike right away, but her revenge would come when you least expected it. She shoved a lifer into a giant clothes dryer two years after the woman stabbed her with a shank. She slit the throat of a guard six months after he started raping a nineteen-year-old newbie. Her motives were impossible to discern. Sometimes revenge or justice. Once the Royals tried a meticulous mass attack on her, but she swatted the twenty women down like flies with her gigantic hands.
    This was my husband, my guardian, my dealer, and my collector. I said to myself that she wasn’t attracted to me. She just liked art. It was probably the most insane relationship of my life, but the most clear. She didn’t abuse it.
    Week after week I produced books for Fits. My eyes began to blur. My fingers were badly blistered and cramped, but on the whole it was great for discipline. I was in a medieval apprenticeship. But there were weeks when my mind was blank, and I had to create images and textures out of raw emotions. Those were some of the most interesting abstracts. Once I had an easy week and decided to draw all the members of my family, from my mom and dad to aunts and cousins and second cousins to their cleaning ladies and gardener. I had a good time, and resorted to an easy boardwalk caricature techniqueI’d used at family Hanukkah parties or for a charity drive for some cause my mother was into. For once my hands weren’t cramped because the technique I’d used was barely more than sketches filled in with watercolor. I handed in the book to Fits, but late that night I woke to find my roommate cowering in the corner and Fits standing over my bed. She began to beat me with the notebook, the metal spirals digging into my skin.
    â€œI’ll not accept this,” she said in her calm voice. “I do not consider carnival tricks art. This is an insult. Fix it immediately.”
    I stumbled into my “studio” in the laundry room half-stoned because I lived on Klonopin or Xanax. I could barely stay awake. I took each caricature and filled it in with real portraiture. Then I took a fountain pen and wrote names, stories, recipes, diagrams—anything I could remember—over sections of each picture in different prints and styles of font. Fits sat on a stool the entire time smoking thin Nat Sherman cigars. I worked until reveille and in every break during the morning and afternoon laundry shifts. I managed to accomplish in hours what would usually take the whole week. When the last page was done Fits grabbed the notebook from my blistered hands and said, “That’s better.” She walked out of the laundry room, and I could see her disappear into the steam.
    Sometimes I think my time at Powell was a hallucination. They keep telling me, but I can’t remember how many years I was locked up there. I don’t know how many notebooks I filled. But my scarred arthritic hands are evidence of the truth. And I know exactly where the notebooks are now. I know how to get them, though I wouldn’t dream of doing so. In another stage of my recovery or insanity I’ll get on a plane and retrieve the boxes filled with the results of Fits’s regime.

THE ASSIGNMENT
    The halfway house was a sorority of damaged women with hope. It was fascinating to watch who was crawling out of her individual hole and who couldn’t summon the energy or will to do anything but get sent back. Seña found a permanent position at a Korean beauty salon and specialized in nail designs. She offered to get me a job, but my hands weren’t made for such