Beaver by Ian Mansfield
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I was about a month into a ninety-day sentence
on a silly little drug charge when Karen came to visit me. I knew she'd
be the first. She's loyal like that. They told me I'd have to show six
months of good behavior before I could have unsupervised visits, which
left me nowhere, or more specifically, talking to Karen through a telephone. "You!" she screamed before she even had the phone to her mouth. The guard cocked his eyes at her and she sat down in the folding chair they had provided. "I'm sorry you have to see me like this," I told her. I'm not sure if I meant it or not. "How you doing?" "You know, managing, staying out of trouble." I laughed a little nervously. "They're not doing anything-" she affected a Deliverance accent- "unnatchel to ya, are they?" "Naw, this is pretty slack. Minimum security. I'm just in the tweaker ward. They're more concerned with not shitting themselves. Or shitting themselves, depending on the stage of withdrawal." "Cool, cool." She glanced around the half-empty room at the handful of other visitations. "God, these people. Where do they get them? Central casting?" "Hey, some of these people happen to be my best friends." I laughed. "How's Marv?" Marvin was her boyfriend. He was okay to be around, be he did too many drugs and I thought he was no good for Karen. I always called him a tool or worse. Sometimes I even called him a homo. She leaned closer to the glass. "Let's put it this way." She looked around again. "You gotten laid in the last month?" "Not intentionally, ha ha." "Well neither have I, motherfucker." She sat back into the folding chair and tried to cross her arms without dropping the phone. This was her payoff. "Damn. Take it things aren't going so well then?" "The homo's always too strung out to fuck. You want me to bake you cookies?" "They'd probably just search them for drugs. You know that. Haven't you seen any prison movies?" "I thought it was hacksaws," she said. "I think that went out when they stopped making us wear striped uniforms with a big ball and chain." [read on] |
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