Vinnette Cooper Zudell

I dreamt of her; when I do, a deep wound inside opens up to breathe.

In the 6000-plus nights of life that I experienced imprisoned, there’s one that rivals the glory of gods. Unfortunately, that same moment cuts both ways. It’s the reason I’m sitting here crying, thinking of her and convulsing with agony. She’s one of the reasons I cry when I’m alone. She’s the dark angel that rendered my soul to a cruel God — the bait He used to try and destroy me.

She was tall and regal, an athletic Venus that shamed Aphrodite. Her smile glowed with beautiful white teeth against chiseled, angular, facial features. There was something about her frame, too — her gait when she walked. I’d distinguish her clearly from a distance, beautiful long bones sprayed with flawless, porcelain black skin. Men and women posed before her, they begged a smile. Her colleagues flexed their badges, and the inmates found their manners. I’d been burned while dreaming so I exercised my distance. I should have known a firefly would fly to die.

The prison was never enough penance for me. I owed eternity, and I cursed the gods that made me. I riled against any God I could imagine. My social status and self-esteem were obliterated, twisted with religion and beaten with conviction. I walked in pieces-my thesis dread and like Galileo, I studied Venus from afar. To spare my ego, I lied to myself and walked around her. The shiny badge on her chest had the weight of a nation behind it. That was my story for the monkeys next to me — numbered cannibals, packaged in skin.

Every cell I lived in had the same absolute void. A void beyond the laws of nature and a million times darker than a crypt or mausoleum. A sterile orifice for the rejects of society. A willing concrete womb. To some, a tomb tattooed with initials and graffiti, always ready to host the rejected phlegms of society. I’d been judged and married to these spiteful, ghastly chambermaids, ever eager to drain a being’s essence.

Alas, physics whispered in her ears and two bodies, dense with emptiness and fraught with social scorn, pulled together. She approached me and whispered, “There’s something about you, Raul.” She knew my name — that’s how she stroked my ego.
I dismantled her approach and laid it out before her. She laughed, and just like that, we were friends.

She opened her lips and offered up her soul. I heard about her lovers and the rapist. Her life unraveled and lay at my feet, an old movie without a reel for structure. She cried and shared life as an abandoned black daughter, lacking a father.

I became her servant, a fiend; she was all I could think about. My cells screamed for her visage. I paced for days, learned her work schedule, and tormented myself. I tempered myself as best as a lone man can temper his being when banished to a void. In this dark dimension, I poured myself out on paper, and the letters flowed between us.

During count one day, she snuck into my cell while I slept, and we kissed. Fuck the world and the system — she risked it all to kiss me. The dam burst and her emptiness bound to mine. I felt my chains choking me back, as she stepped back out and locked me in my cell. I paced in my little space like a mad man, once more cursing my existence. The invisible walls of social status got even thicker. With a kiss, I found a measure of hope. Naively, I dared to believe I could ever be free… that we could ever be.