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{the bitch of cellblock d} margaux fragoso Things hadn’t been right for Chris ever since they moved her girlfriend Miranda to maximum security. When they took Miranda, Chris had started smelling things. Not that she hadn’t noticed the odors of the prison before–Dial hand soap and unwashed necks, one woman’s passion and another’s menstrual blood, Athlete’s foot, guard sweat, staleness, canned peaches in the cafeteria, blood from head-banging, blood from a fight, tears. Not that she hadn’t noticed that tears had scent before–that they smelled something like salt, not salt from the clean glass saltshaker, not prissy, not ionized; body salt is different, it’s almost like the sea. She had noticed that once because she had a cunt crybaby roommate who wouldn’t shut up until Chris punched her in the face. That was when Chris was younger and madder, when she first got here. Before she was in love. After having love, Chris was not a bad sort of person. The change surprised her because she had always been mean, mean as a wolf that had just been blinded since she was about three. Mean had always been her and she hadn’t wanted to change, if no other reason than it was just easier to go along with the pattern of your life than to change it. Miranda was Chris’s cellmate for six months. She wrote a poem about an exploded daffodil and it really spoke to Chris. Or maybe Miranda was just pretty and curvy and Chris was horny and had never liked men, even though she didn’t like bitches either; but Miranda was a bitch she liked; so they made love and it was fresh and dirty and smelled like dandruff or the earth being dug up. It was not like being in love turned Chris nice but she was too preoccupied to spit in anyone’s food or slam them into a bathroom sink if they bumped into her. See, Chris had always been a philosophical person. She loved nature. For instance, a kid she had known in third grade used to have a display of Monarch butterflies, pins sticking right through them, and for that atrocity, she broke his motherfucking jaw. Chris had had love and now love had departed and she wasn’t going to be all sappy and sad about it. She wasn’t going to be angry either, because what was the point of that; she had been angry all her life and it never made her happy. So she would just try to meet someone new. Get another girlfriend. The whole stinking rotted world was opened up and she was going to plumb it for treasure. |
