Malcolm Ivey / Author

Part One: Eight Weeks | Chapter 10

Welcome to Year of the Firefly: The Free Serialization. Here’s Chapter 10. 📖 New chapters are released every Monday and Thursday. Whether you’re a long-time reader or discovering my work for the first time, you can read the entire novel on Substack for free. Visit there anytime to catch up on chapters you may have missed. 📚 Prefer holding a real book in your hands? Skip the weekly wait and grab the complete paperback edition right now on Amazon or other online retailers. Ebook is available on Amazon and Kindle+. 📝 New to my writing? Explore all eight of my published books on my website, malcolmivey.com. 🙂 Thank you for reading, and as always, reviews are highly appreciated! Wishing you momentum. —IV

👉Looking for Chapter 1? Begin here: Part One: Eight Weeks | Chapter 1

👉Read about the genesis of Miranda McGuire here: To My Incarcerated Sisters

👉Get an introduction to Year of the Firefly here: Introduction to Book One of the Miranda Rights series

CHAPTER 10

Violent diarrhea surged through her bowels, jolting her awake. She sat straight up, her sweat-dampened hair compressed, sponge-like, against the overhead steel of the top bunk. Gripped by confusion and panic, her eyes darted around the alien landscape of the cell. A shaft of moonlight sliced through the mesh-plated window, illuminating the stainless toilet near the barred door.

She rolled out of the bunk and stumbled across the floor, hobbled by searing cramps. The blinding pain took her breath away. She tugged at the buttons of her jump­suit, shedding it on the way, before crash landing on the frozen tundra of the toilet seat in the nick of time. The sloshing sound of water on water echoed from the walls and spilled through the bars out onto the catwalk.

Then came the vomit.

There was nothing she could do but open her trembling cramp-ridden legs and aim for the toilet. She puked all over herself. Luckily, it was mostly fluid and bile. It had been days since she had eaten.

Footsteps. Humming. The powerful scent of cologne washed through the cell bars. A flashlight beam fell over her. She covered herself with her hands. Another expulsion sluiced from her bowels.

“Well that’s attractive,” smirked the masculine silhou­ette on the other side of the flashlight.

Her humiliation was quickly strangled by her intestines. Her body tensed as another geyser of membranous bile rocketed up her esophagus and overflowed from her lips. She retched, coughed, spat, then wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. Mercifully, the flashlight moved on.

An army of chills burst forth from the sweaty pools of her collarbone, climbing over her shoulders and scampering down her back. She shivered as the storm subsided.

Silent darkness followed, broken only by the hollow drip of excreta that trickled from her body into the water below. She felt disgusting, she felt sticky, she felt weak, she felt . . .

Eyes on her.

She scanned the cell and found them hovering a few feet above her. Big owlish eyes in the face of a child. Toes curled over the side of the top bunk, skinny arms wrapped around skinny knees, hands clasped at the shins.

“Be careful you don’t lose it,” she cautioned. Her voice childlike and atmospheric, little more than a whisper.

Miranda frowned at the ethereal creature. “Excuse me?”

“You have to be careful,” she repeated, “or you’ll lose it.”

“Lose what?”

“Your baby.”

Miranda glanced at her concave stomach, slick with bile. “I’m not pregnant. Just a little dopesick.”

The girl rocked herself on the edge of the bunk, entranced. “Your hair is red, like fire.”

Just what we need, her inner narrator stirred, a psycho cellmate.

She covered her breasts and reached behind her for the toilet paper. “Would you mind giving me a few min­utes of privacy?”

“It’s okay,” announced the girl, seeming to emerge from her mystic daze. “I’m not a lesbian. Officer Woodley hates lesbians. She says she likes to zap them with her stun gun. But I’ve never seen her do it.”

“Good to know,” said Miranda. “I just want to finish up down here. And it’s a little awkward, wiping, with you . . . watching me.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you held my hand sometimes, though,” the girl continued, unhearing, “like if it was thundering real hard outside.”

Is this part of the nightmare? Miranda wondered as she cleaned herself.

“Are you a lesbian?” the girl asked.

Instead of answering, Miranda flushed the toilet. The powerful roar of institutional plumbing thundered be­neath her. She could feel the centrifugal force pulling her against the cold seat. The thing could suck down a blanket. Rivulets of sweat and bile were vacuumed from her thighs. After a full thirty seconds, she glanced up at her cellmate, still babbling away. She reached behind her and hit the button a few more times. Then she struggled to her feet, dampened the toilet paper in the sink and cleaned the remaining vomit.

It was difficult to do in the dark, especially with her knees buckling from shooting pain and cramps. She gripped the stainless steel with one hand while dabbing at herself with the other. As the deafening roar of the toilet diminished, the girl’s voice returned, fading in like a radio signal.

“. . . she was gonna name me Sunset but then changed her mind at the last minute and named me Amity. Amity Davenport. It means friendship.”

There was a sliver of soap in the sink, thin as a wafer of consecrated bread. She worked it between her hands and managed some weak suds which she then rubbed against her sickly sallow skin.

The girl hovered over her shoulder at the end of the top bunk, floating there like an apparition. “What’s your name?”

“Miranda.” She cupped sink water in her hands to rinse away the soap.

“Like Miranda Lambert?” said Amity.

She shook her head and squinted into a rusty reflec­tionless piece of metal that was bolted into the wall over the toilet. Even if the cell lights were on, she doubted she would be able to see herself. Probably for the best. “Miranda is one of five moons that orbit Uranus,” she recited mechanically. The irony of spouting fun facts about moons and Uranus while naked and withdrawing over a county jail toilet had big scene potential. She made a mental note to remember it for the memoir. But then a round of cramps tore through her body like a power surge, overriding all mental activity with a white-hot explosion of pain. She gasped and gripped the sink as her knees buckled again. A fingernail splintered and chipped from the pressure.

“Are you okay?” The girl slid from the top bunk, landing nimbly on the balls of her feet. Unruly coils of frizzy black hair spiraled out in every direction, merging with the darkness. Her palm was cool against Miranda’s shoulder blade. “You’re sweating. Do you want me to wash your back?”

“No!” She spun around.

Amity’s hand fell to her side. “I’m sorry.”

Miranda grabbed her rumpled jumpsuit from the floor and hastily put it on, stealing glances at her cellmate as she fiddled with the buttons. She wore tattered thermal long johns bottoms and a sports bra. Biracial or Latina? It was difficult to tell. Her unblemished skin glowed like amber in the moonlight. Mocha-colored baby fat encircled her dimples. A full head shorter than Miranda’s five feet six inches, Amity looked like she belonged in middle school, or summer camp . . . anywhere but the Escambia County jail.

The dreamlike image of her waving from the top tier on the day Miranda arrived pulled sharply into focus and held for a moment before fragmenting and finally disintegrating back into the murky depths of her subconscious. “How long have I been here?”

“Two days,” said Amity. “But you haven’t really been here. You’ve been asleep. That doesn’t count. They can only hold us here when we’re awake. Do you believe in astral projection? It’s when the soul leaves the body . . .”

Instead of answering, Miranda staggered over to her bunk and sat down. Two days. That meant it was—

“So, what did they arrest you for?”

Miranda leaned back in her unmade bunk. “Heroin.”

“Me too,” said Amity.

“And a gun.”

“Me too.”

She closed her eyes. The four walls of the cell soon melted away. The nausea evaporated. The cramps dimin­ished. The howling ache settled back into a whisper. Suddenly she was back in her car, staring down a narrow alley of adjacent apartment buildings, awaiting Nick’s return. As she faded off to sleep, she wondered if she was astral projecting or merely dreaming.