I'm just staring up at the sky. Perfect. The aurora – our Polar Light, as we call it – is flickering once in a while, the eerie greenish light reaching from the treetops to the sky, the stars, like pure diamonds of ice, suspended in the bitter cold.
I am Cold. ME. I'm like, never cold.
I am so cold I can't even think. So cold my muscles don't work right, that my hands won't grasp, that I cannot keep focused. I realize what's going on... shit.
People are staring at me.
It's my turn! It's my turn... what number am I?
“Ten?” I say, my voice shaking, my breath immediately becoming a cloud of icy vapor in front of my face.
“Start again!” calls the guard.
“One!” calls the first prisoner in formation. The woman beside her calls “Two.”
The inmate beside me turns and punches me hard in the face, right above my left eye. I go down in the snow, hard, onto my hands, my head hits the ground, the snow packed firmly from our collective feet, stamping them to stay warm. Where my head hit the ground, the snow is deep red – blood always looks so dark on the snow, almost black – and it takes me a moment to realize it is my blood.
I quickly scramble back to my feet. The prisoner who hit me – a Sebiestor woman a good bit taller than me, older than me – stands, eyes forward, and calls her number as I regain my feet.
“Thirty one” she says, and then looks at me. She's imploring for me to just call my number.
We've been out here for an hour, trying to count from one to seventy three, the number of prisoners in 9 block, lined up in as square a formation as you can make of seventy three people. The thermometer on the wall to my left – there were thermometers everywhere here, they wanted to be sure we knew how cold it was – registered -17. Someone kept screwing the count up, because they didn't speak standard Matari, or because, like me, they were just out of it from fatigue.
We had all just worked ten hours, and after this count, we could all go in and go to sleep.
Everyone knew that.
I'm freezing.
The guards have just watched me get hit – again, this happens to me once or maybe twice a week – and not one of them makes a peep. They have gloves and hats and long, warm coats. I'm covered in snow, and all I have on are my scrubs and a cheap pair of work boots – I don't have any socks, because another inmate stole them from me, no thermals, for the same reason – and I have been being bullied like this since I arrived here, four months ago. I'm tired, I'm hungry, I'm bleeding, I'm freezing cold, and I fucking hate everything about this place.
It did not occur to me until later that I stopped caring what happened next. I honestly expected that one of the guards would just shoot me.
“Ten.” I said, staring at the bitch that just hit me. I then punch her square in the nose, as hard as I have ever hit anything in my life. My hand makes a loud pop as I do, and the pain shoots up my forearm – I didn't keep my wrist straight, like my DI had instructed me years ago. I don't care.
I'm now straddling her stomach, my knees on either side of her, and I am just punching, I don't care what happens. I'm angry. I'm screaming. I'm crying. The guards intervene this time – lucky for me, to be fair, as I would have likely went until I killed her – and hold me down until I stop screaming.
The count is over. The other inmate goes to the infirmary.
I go to adseg. I don't see a doctor about my hand until the following morning.
I'm in adseg for 15 days. When I get back to general, no one steals from me anymore.
Author
Topic: Breaking Point (Read 578 times)