Story code: ST-000812
Part 2: The Price of Ink
Jess pressed her palms flat against the freezing cinderblock, the abrasive paint biting into her skin. In maximum security, hesitation bought you a broken rib. But as she spread her legs and stared at the gray wall, her peripheral vision stayed locked on the thin wool blanket of her cot.
The handmade butterfly card sat there, vibrant and glaringly illegal.
Officer Miller stepped into Cell 41, accompanied by a rookie guard whose boots squeaked on the concrete. “Toss it,” Miller grunted.
Jess’s heart hammered against her ribs. The card was made of contraband. The colored pencils used for the monarch’s wings had cost her weeks of rations. If Miller saw it, the card wouldn’t just be confiscated; it would be destroyed, and she would be written up, losing what little good behavior time she had clawed back.
The rookie moved toward the bunk. Jess acted on pure, desperate instinct. “Officer,” she said, deliberately turning her head off the wall. “My toilet is backing up again.”
“Eyes front!” Miller barked, stepping toward her with his baton raised.
The rookie paused, distracted by the sudden tension, glancing at the stainless-steel commode. In that half-second, Jess dropped one hand from the wall, snatched the butterfly card from the blanket, and shoved it down the front of her canvas trousers.
Miller slammed her back against the cinderblock. The impact knocked the wind out of her, her cheekbone cracking against the unforgiving stone. “Hands on the wall, inmate! You want a trip to the hole?”
“Sorry,” she gasped, tasting copper. “Sorry. Rats in the vents. Spooked me.”
Miller sneered, patting her down roughly, but he stayed focused on her back and legs, missing the flat cardboard pressed flat against her stomach. “Tear it down,” he told the rookie.
They ripped her mattress off the metal frame. They dumped her small box of legal paperwork onto the floor. And then, the rookie found the flexible pen and the single sheet of blank paper Jess had placed on the sink.
“Unapproved writing materials,” the rookie said, holding up the pen.
“Trash it,” Miller said. “Lockdown means no personal correspondence. Legal mail only.”
The rookie snapped the flexible pen in half. Black ink splattered across the rim of the metal sink. He crumpled the blank paper and threw it into his garbage bag.
They walked out, slamming the barred door shut. The electronic lock engaged with a deafening *clack*. “Full lockdown,” Miller’s voice echoed down the gallery. “No movement, no commissary, no mail.”
Jess slid down the wall until she hit the cold concrete floor. She pulled the butterfly card from her pants. The cardboard was slightly bent, but the wings were intact. She placed it carefully on her knees. Her cheek throbbed where it had hit the wall, but the physical pain was nothing compared to the crushing weight of the ticking clock.
Mia’s birthday was in six days. The mail took at least five to process through Arthur’s pristine, white-collar facility. If the butterfly didn’t leave this block by tomorrow morning, it would be late. To Mia, it would mean her mother had forgotten her. Again.
But Jess had no pen. She had no paper.
She looked at the crumpled mess of her cell, her eyes landing on the thick, cream-colored envelope Arthur had sent. *Camp Eden*. The pristine gold-foil return address mocked her from the dirty floor.
She crawled over and picked it up. She could write on the inside of the envelope. But she needed ink.
Jess crawled to the bars. “Books,” she hissed to the neighboring cell. “Books, you awake?”
A low grunt came from Cell 42. Books was a lifer, a woman who had spent two decades building a subterranean empire of smuggled goods.
“I need a pen,” Jess whispered, her voice barely carrying over the distant alarms.
“Lockdown just hit, Jess. Heat’s too high. Prices go up.”
“I need it now. Today.”
A long silence. “Your thermal shirt. And your boots.”
Jess looked down at her heavy, state-issued boots. The concrete floors of the maximum-security wing hovered just above freezing in the winter. Without them, she’d be in thin canvas slip-ons. Without the thermal shirt, she would shiver through the nights for the next four months.
She didn’t even blink. She unlaced her boots and pulled the thermal shirt over her head, her breath pluming in the cold air of the cell. She tied them together with a strip torn from her bedsheet and fished them across the gap between the bars.
Two minutes later, a tiny, chewed-up blue ink cartridge slid across the concrete into her cell.
Jess sat on her bare metal bunk, shivering in her thin uniform. She flattened the cream envelope and opened it up, exposing the unwritten inside. She gripped the tiny ink cartridge, the plastic biting into her fingertips.
*You must provide a formal, written confession renouncing your unnatural lifestyle.*
Arthur’s voice echoed in her head, smooth, cultured, entirely devoid of empathy. He was playing God from a tennis court.
She pressed the pen to the paper. *I, Jessica…*
The ink flowed. The words felt like bile in her throat. *…confess that my sexuality is a sickness. A sin.*
She was carving out her own heart and mailing it to the man who had destroyed her life. Arthur didn’t care about her soul. He cared about submission. He was a wall of pure, sociopathic control, and she was bleeding herself dry trying to write a message that he would only ever use to build the wall higher. How much of herself could she strip away? If she gave him this piece of her identity today, what would he demand next year? She was writing to a wall, begging a stone for water.
She finished the paragraph. *I repent for the deviance that broke my family apart.*
She signed it. Her hands were shaking violently. Not from the freezing temperature of the cell, but from the violent betrayal of her own identity. She had done it. She had surrendered.
She folded the envelope around the butterfly card.
Then, the intercom above the gallery crackled to life.
“Attention all inmates. The lockdown is now classified as Level Five. All outgoing mail privileges are suspended indefinitely. The mail cart will not run.”
Jess stared at the folded paper in her hands. The submission was complete, the cost paid, but the avenue was sealed. The only person who would walk past her cell tomorrow morning was Officer Miller. If she handed him the unapproved envelope, he would read it. He would see the contraband card. He would know everything.
To get the butterfly to Mia, she would have to put her fate, and her agonizing confession, directly into the hands of the guard who had just thrown her against a wall.