Diary from the Inside by Wen Wen Yang

Wednesday: Had fun. Scared my lawyer today, plus some. He said I could get time taken off if I told them where the body was. The family came too, pleading. The girl, I think she was the guy’s daughter or something, was a real treat. Full of tears. She has his blue eyes, but hers weren’t so hardened with time. I grinned at her. She flinched. Easy. I opened my mouth, as if to say something. She leaned closer, desperate. I snapped my teeth at her. She actually gasped. Her mother, or aunt, or something, cursed at me and pulled the girl away. I blew a kiss at both of them. I watched them walk out of the room. It’d been a while since I saw someone with a double-X chromosome.

Thursday: Saw some guys looking at me funny while I was on the lunch line. When I first got in, they heard the charges, and stayed clear of me. There were embellishments of course, cannibalism, Satanism, all that b.s. Thought the honeymoon shock was wearing thin, so I attacked my cellmate to get a goodnight’s rest in the solitary cell and earn some respect. You don’t attack a guy who pulls a Tyson and goes down the corridor screaming “Your blood would do just as well as his.”

Friday: Guards don’t talk when they stand by my cell. I pretended to sleep on the paper-thin mattress and read a moldy book.

Satuday: Food’s so terrible I’m losing weight. I need to bulk up.

…

Several months later, Monday: It’s official: twenty five years before I might get paroled. I’d be Social Security material by then. I do not intend to stay that long. Gotta work out a plan.

Tuesday: There’s nothing on the outside for me. Nothing on the inside either. I just want out.

Friday: Got an idea. The alpha dog is this guy with more concealed weapons on him and on his friends than there are rats in New York City, animal and otherwise. I’m going to try to bring him down. If I do, no one will mess with me in here. In the more likely scenario that I don’t, well, I’m sure that half a dozen shivs with angry bastards on the other end of them will make it a quick end. Quick end vs. twenty five plus years looking over my shoulder.

Bye everybody. I’ll miss you just as little as you miss me.