Welcome to Year of the Firefly: The Free Serialization. Here’s Chapter 9. 📖 New chapters are released every Monday and Thursday. Whether you’re a long-time reader or discovering my work for the first time, you can read the entire novel on Substack for free. Visit there anytime to catch up on chapters you may have missed. 📚 Prefer holding a real book in your hands? Skip the weekly wait and grab the complete paperback edition right now on Amazon or other online retailers. Ebook is available on Amazon and Kindle+. 📝 New to my writing? Explore all eight of my published books on my website, malcolmivey.com. 🙂 Thank you for reading, and as always, reviews are highly appreciated! Wishing you momentum. —IV
👉Looking for Chapter 1? Begin here: Part One: Eight Weeks | Chapter 1
👉Read about the genesis of Miranda McGuire here: To My Incarcerated Sisters
👉Get an introduction to Year of the Firefly here: Introduction to Book One of the Miranda Rights series
CHAPTER 9
She sleepwalked her way through first appearance, vaguely aware of the austere, robe-clad figure on the video screen who upheld her bond, appointed a public defender, and kept the line moving.
A few of the male inmates catcalled as the deputy escorted her back down the aisle with a group of women, but she looked through them with dead eyes, too embarrassed to be offended, too numb to care. She staggered forward in a daze, swallowed by the green and white striped county jumpsuit, occasionally jolted awake by shooting pain and cramping in her legs. Even in her addled state, she recognized this for what it was: a distant early warning. The first flashes of lightning in an approaching storm. Though she had no idea what time it was, her body was telling her that it had been too long since she snorted her last pill. The dreaded misery of withdrawals was looming.
Hopefully Nick was working on getting her out.
Her stomach lurched as the elevator rattled and whined its way up to the sixth floor. The white-bearded, rosy-cheeked deputy was humming a tune that sounded strangely similar to Blind Pilot’s “Just One.” She wondered, not for the first time, if she was trapped in some vivid opioid nightmare. How did this grandfather guard know Blind Pilot? He must have read her mind because he winked at her as the doors hissed open. “Good luck, ladies. Hopefully your stay is a short one.”
There were three other women in the elevator, all black. A tall corn-rowed butch with her sleeves rolled up to accentuate her massive biceps, a bespectacled old woman with wiry gray chin hair, and a petite honey-skinned girl with wide-set green eyes and a jumpsuit that was three sizes too small. She followed them out into the hallway, a wedge-shaped corridor that dead-ended into a painted blue door with a scratched plexiglass window. They waited there a moment, each lost in her trauma, each no doubt processing the recent events that led to her standing in the sixth-floor lobby of the Escambia County jail. Miranda certainly was.
Until the musclebound woman stepped forward and slapped the plexiglass hard enough to make the building tremble.
The older lady screamed, “Jesus!” Miranda flinched. The door buzzed. They walked inside.
A stump of a woman with straw-colored hair and jagged brown teeth pulled her belt almost to her breasts and led with her crotch as she exited the officers’ station. “My word. Are y’all that impatient to go sit in a cell? Just chomping at the bit ain’t you?” She paused to scratch her nose and mumbled something into her hand that sounded a lot like damn lezbos before pointing a dirty fingernail at a cart in the corner. “Bed rolls are over there.”
Miranda followed the other women to the cart and grabbed a cylinder of wool. Wrapped inside the blanket were a towel and washcloth, two sheets, a pillowcase, a roll of toilet paper, a thin bar of soap, a tiny toothbrush, and a small clear tube of Maximum Security toothpaste.
“All right,” the guard clapped her hands, “any of y’all been on Blue Six before?”
No one spoke.
“Nobody?” She looked from face to face. “Well, well, well, a bunch of virgins.”
Cornrows crossed her powerful arms. “I ain’t no virgin. Facts.”
“Figure of speech,” she scratched her nose again. “Dang, y’all are about the least social bunch I’ve had this year. Where’s your sense of humor?”
Sense of humor? thought Miranda, tired eyes surveying the lay of the land. Was this woman serious?
LED lights blinked from the control panel in the dark officers’ station. Computer monitors divided into frames flashed black and white images of inmates playing cards, watching television, exercising. The booth itself was a capsule of concrete and glass in the center of the unit with a panoramic view of the four surrounding color-coded pods: Blue, Green, Orange and Red.
“Well, seeing that nobody’s feeling social, I guess I’ll give y’all the short version. My name is Officer Woodley and Blue Six is my floor . . .”
You can have it. Miranda stared through the thick glass of the nearest pod. Everything was painted Halloween orange. Women were gathered in groups on the second tier, leaning against the mesh railing. Others were standing inside their cell doors. A diminutive girl with big eyes and wild black curly hair shooting in every direction waved shyly. She waved back without thinking.
“Excuse me, Orphan Annie. Whenever you get done flirting, I’ll continue.”
Miranda dropped her hand.
“Good girl. Now, a couple of ground rules.” She patted the canary rubber weapon holstered on her side. “This here taser is capable of sending thousands of volts of electricity into your body. It won’t kill you, but it’ll make you wish you was dead. I try my best not to shoot nobody in the face but,” she shrugged and smiled, “my aim ain’t all that great.”
Another scratch of the nose. Miranda looked into her eyes. Pinpoint pupils. Definitely an opiate user. She wondered what she was on, wished she would share.
“I know some of y’all are pissed off because you got caught doing whatever you were doing out there. A lot of women come in with a chip on their shoulder. But I’m letting you know right now, I don’t tolerate any fighting on my floor. If I catch you fighting, I ain’t going in there trying to break it up. Damn near got my finger bit off doing that once.” She glanced down at her hand as if to make sure the digit in question was still attached. “Won’t happen again. If you fight, you’re getting tased. Bank on it.”
Miranda stifled a yawn. She had never been in a fight in her life and she had no inclination to turn over a new leaf on the sixth floor of the Escambia County jail. She just wanted to sleep.
“Second thing,” shrunken narrowed eyes swept back and forth over the bedraggled group of women, “if I catch you in someone else’s bunk, you’re getting tased. No questions asked.”
“Just for sitting on someone’s bunk?” The green-eyed woman in the extra tight jumpsuit sucked her teeth; a petite, more voluptuous Rihanna whose only blemish was a scar across her cheekbone.
“Sitting is fine,” Officer Woodley explained, “sitting is not an abomination in the sight of the Lord or a violation of the rules of this here facility. Sitting I have no problem with.”
Sitting is the new smoking. Her inner narrator chimed in, apropos of nothing. The sleep deprivation was clearly taking its toll.
“But if I catch you doing unnatural things, fornicating for instance . . .” She drew her taser like a gunfighter, fired an imaginary dart, and blew on the barrel. “I’ll zap you like a bug.”
Though she said nothing, Miranda was incredulous. Appalled. This was the exact type of Draconian institutional abuse that her chapter of the Students Against Mass Incarceration had marched against.
“Last—and this is a pet peeve of mine—do not bang on my glass. Unless you’re dying.” She turned and glared up at the towering woman standing next to Miranda. “If I wanted to work around a bunch of zoo animals, I’d ask my shift commander to reassign me to the fourth floor.”
Cornrows scowled but said nothing.
“Do we understand each other, ladies?” Instead of waiting for an answer, she leaned back into the officers’ station and grabbed a printout. “Jones?”
“Yes ma’am,” said the elderly woman.
“You’re going to Red Three Low.” She pointed to her left. “Right over there. The rest of y’all are going to the Orange side. Who’s Bradshaw?”
Green Eyes stepped forward.
“You’re moving to Five Upper.” She frowned at her printout and looked up at the hulking figure standing next to Miranda. “Jackson?”
“Good guess,” said the dyke.
She scratched her nose again. “Nebraska? Is that an alias?”
Her jaw worked. “Nah, it ain’t no alias. It’s what my momma named me. Why? You got a rule against that too? You gonna tase me cuz my name’s Nebraska?”
“I might,” she said, “especially if you keep on with that attitude.”
The woman named Nebraska smirked. “Well, if you do, you make sure you give me all the electricity you’ve got in that little toy gun you so proud of. Zoo animals like me are a little harder to bring down than these domesticated bitches you’ve got up here. Facts.”
Tension crackled in the ensuing standoff. Bad vibes washed over Miranda like a January wave in the Gulf. She had to say something. “Maybe we’re all just tired and cranky—”
“Stay out of this!” snapped the guard. Her eyes locked on Nebraska. “What are you in here for? Robbery? Aggravated assault? Attempted murder?”
Nebraska’s nostrils flared. “I don’t do attempts.”
Officer Woodley opened her mouth then closed it, then finally said, “Well, I’ll just look your charges up on the computer.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“Orange Three Low,” she icily read the bunk number from her printout. “But don’t get too comfortable, I doubt you’ll be there long.”
Powerful shoulders shrugged.
The guard aimed her opiated pupils in Miranda’s direction. “McGuire?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Hmmph . . . ‘least somebody’s got some manners.” She slapped the paper against her palm. “Orange Nine Low.”
Miranda looked over her shoulder through the thick wall of glass into what would be her home for the foreseeable future. At least until Nick figured out a way to get her out. The women of Blue Six Orange were congregating on the landing, smiling, scowling, watching, waiting. Maybe it will be similar to a college dorm room, she thought.
Officer Woodley walked back into the officers’ station and leaned over the control panel. An orange painted steel door rumbled open. Miranda followed Nebraska and Rihanna into the holding cage. The door rumbled shut. As they waited for the bars to roll and release them into the pod, she felt the big woman glowering down at her. She ventured a glance. Oh my gosh. Such pain in those eyes. They held a lifetime of struggle, abuse, oppression, poverty, strife . . .
Instinctively, she reached up and touched her arm. “I don’t think it was Ms. Woodley’s intention to call you a zoo animal.”
She frowned at Miranda’s hand like it was a splat of bird shit on the sleeve of her jumpsuit. “Get your motherfuckin’ hand off me, bitch.”