Ilaria

“FRESH MEAT! HOLLA, GURRRRRL, AIN’T YOU A PRETTY PIECE OF ASS!”

Ilaria tucked her head down to her chin and pretended that they were speaking to the lass behind her. Fat chance, it was a case of beauty and the beast when making comparisons between the two. Besides, from the way the woman gyrated her hips in Ilaria’s direction and did the universal sign for eating a bit of minge to general applause from behind the chain wire then that theory was put to rest before it even came to fruition.

She wanted nothing more than to tilt her head back, soak in those last bits of sunshine before being thrown in the clink but that was a luxury that she couldn’t afford. No, she needed to keep her eyes on the alpha’s around and make sure that she made it into the prison without being molested – yessum that sounded like a fine plan.

A crime of passion was what the judge called it. For Ilaria, there was nothing passionate about it. Yes, she had snapped. Yes, Alex’s throat had been slit. Yes, she was feeling rather angry at the time, but no, no passion. Normally a placid individual – to a fault, actually, Ilaria had bit her tongue and watched her p’s and q’s with her boyfriend since the dawn of time it had seemed. In reality, it was really only three years. Those studies they did in cosmo all hinted at the lust running out after that time – with an almost clinical detachment she concluded that this was what must have happened.

The courts thought otherwise. The conclusion that they reached was that after finding evidence of an affair she had bit the bullet so to speak. Waited until he was asleep and performed a little bit of home surgery – paying particular attention to the trachea. An open and shut case, and being very guilty of the crime Ilaria hadn’t really tried too hard with the arguments. The reality of it was much more boring. You see, Alex had this terrible habit of snoring, not really his fault – but after the fourth night in a row with little to no sleep Ilaria had had enough. Very calmly she had walked into the kitchen, grabbed the closest knife, walked back into the room and sliced him from ear to ear.

On the plus side, she got the best night’s sleep that night than she had gotten in years - pleasant, deep and undisturbed; that is until the police showed up. Being caught so fast had nothing to do with the particular crime but more to do with Alex’s busy body Mother who ‘popped’ in at the most unfortunate times (like when she had just murdered Alex). It was almost serenely that she had submitted to the questioning, psychiatric evaluation and the sentencing. A girl can do anything with a good rest!

Now, she wasn’t so sure. What in the hell would this place have in store for her? The sound of the gravel crunching underfoot punctuated the calls from either side of the fence. Before she had even reached the processing centre she had been propositioned four times, been tripped up and decided that snoring probably wasn’t such a bad thing after all. If possible, the processing centre was the worse than walking down judgement lane. Drug checks were invasive, followed by the group showers – cleaning up the junkies and clearing them of the filth of the streets. The law didn’t discriminate, if you were in there you were less than a creature. Everyone got the same treatment in the beginning; it wasn’t the processing officers that were the corrupt ones.

The prisoners were separated into groups according to the nature of their crimes. Naturally, Ilaria drew the short straw. Being that it was murder and she hadn’t shown any remorse she was placed in with the seasoned criminals – the ones that would probably never be allowed to see the outside of this dreary place. They were tough, and they were mean and the first night Ilaria was certain that she had ended up in hell for trying to catch some Z’s.

Don’t let anyone tell you that males are the horrible sex. What Ilaria seen those first few days would be enough to put the female gender to shame for the next few centuries. Females are nasty with a capital N. Those on J Block were possibly the nastiest of the lot. Even though the prison was co-ed, the set up was that they were separated. The only time the general populations were allowed to mingle was at meal times and twice the amount of guards were present during these times. It led to, shall we say, a lot of pent up sexual tension which inmates often released upon each other.

Ilaria had been doing the rounds. Prisoners were allowed to take jobs that would earn them extra money to go into their bank accounts. At some point she wanted to head up the kitchens – there was a bit of extra cash in that, as well as the added benefit of food – You take what you can get. However, beggars can’t be choosers in the beginning and she chose to do the laundry run. When Ilaria thought back on it she wondered why she didn’t do anything. Survival in this place, most likely, but if the situation was reversed she would definitely want someone to step in for her.

It had been a quiet morning. Most people were out in the yards catching some sunshine while they could. Exercising, playing cards – the like, so she had pretty much had the place to herself except for the guards – and when you weren’t doing anything wrong they tended to leave you alone. She had collected the sheets from the rooms with the help of one of the minimum security inmates – a sort of pairing where the lesser charged helped the J Block inmate “socialise better” – a bunch of bullshit according to Ilaria but that was another story all together.

Approaching the laundry room had seen nothing out of place. The empty steel trolleys were all lined up in formation, clean towels were racked as you just walked in – stunk of sunlight soap but, hey, this was prison not your Grandma’s house. The steady hum of the ten commercial quality kleenmaids permeated the laundry room, bouncing off the walls and causing an acoustic humdrum that almost, just almost, covered up the screams. To begin with neither Ilaria or Emma – the woman she had been paired with – said anything, they just went about the process of emptying the dryers, re-filling the washers and carrying on as if everything were normal. The laundry room was a common place of punishment for inmates who had done wrong according to prison rules – those set by the prisoners themselves – it wasn’t uncommon for someone to cop a beating in the boiler room.

To Ilaria, though, the time dragged on enough. After half an hour she looked up at Emma, indicated with a cock of her head what she would be doing and left her to fold up the sheets. By her calculations the screaming had been going on for the full twenty minutes that they had been back, who knows how long it had dragged out before that. No matter what the woman had done, it was time to put a stop to it. The door to the boiler room had been broken for as long as Ilaria had been here and even as she pushed on the heated steel her senses had been on alert.

In the beginning she didn’t recognise the scene that greeted her, it was all just a mish-mash of colour – red, brown, white, grey. Later, she would reflect that her brain simply didn’t want to process it. Three woman stood over another woman on the ground. Ilaria recognised the three standing up, Mama – the enormous black woman with the cornrows, her boobs were as big as Ilaria’s head and she was the one that ran J Block. A matriarch amongst her minions, the Queen of all the lost souls; she collected new inmates like nerds collected pokemon.

The other two were two bit players in Mama’s entourage; mere underlings in the game – as it was. Most likely these were the two newest members of Mama’s “family”, out to prove themselves as worthy in the eyes of the Queen. A heavyset blonde woman, with shoulders twice as wide as Ilaria’s and a mean look in her ice blue eyes, and a pretty latina – probably rejected from the Hispanic portion of the population based on the tattoos that littered her body – hers signalled allegiance to the Sicilians, whilst the vast majority of the prisoner’s on J Block were Mexican mafia.

All this was taken in at a glance by Ilaria. She was especially observant – a skill that came in handy in her old life, but meant the difference between life and death here . The splintered broom that hung loosely from Blondies hand left little to the imagination for what it had been used for, same went for the broken iron pipe, Ilaria thought at the time, rather churlishly, that the heating wouldn’t be the same for a while. It didn’t help the girl lying on the floor, though. Her moans had been steadily growing whilst Ilaria had stood there and she could almost see her heartbeat through the ragged and bloody hole where her vagina used to be. (Things weren’t meant to be like that!)

It took Ilaria moments to move. A muttered apology and she was on her way back out to the laundry room. Emma had looked at her in askance, raising her eyebrows in that universal way questioned what had happened. Ilaria had shook her head minutely, signalling that now was not the time. Five minutes later the three women exited the boiler room, not even looking at either Emma or Ilaria – not even needing to; there would be no talking from here. The laundry guard came in a few minutes later, obviously alerted by Mama.

What followed that afternoon had been a chaotic and distressing series of events where Emma and Ilaria had been separated and given their eyewitness accounts. As expected, no charges were pressed because everyone refused to talk. Prison dogs were few and far between. No one would give up information and these days torture was frowned upon.

Ilaria still felt guilty about the nameless woman she had refused to help, but at least she hadn’t slit the woman’s throat while she slept.