You line up on barbed wire, facing a creek. “Bump down, bump down!” Cries the sarge. You squeeze “nuts to butt,” staring at each other’s necks. “Bump down!” Which way? “I’m doing this way.” A lifer gestures vaguely at freedom. Ha-ha. “Aggies up!” You raise your hoes in a thirty-man salute, facing liongrass, your i Just Took A DNA Test Turns Out Im 100 That Witch Shirt Your blades will swing like a Spartan phalanx, inches from your neighbors’ faces. Guards adjust your position like battlefield commanders. One moves you up, one down. You once saw a YouTube video of thousands of Thai prisoners reenacting Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” You are a poor imitation. “Man, fuck America!” laughs a black inmate, old cellie “50,” with fifty years.
Then you smell it. The creek. It hits you like a poison bomb: the “water” is solid dappled-green shit. A two-thousand man sewer. The horror of what you’re about to do sinks in.
Now you sing. “One!-We up, two!-We up, three!” You strike the ground like robots, and “fo’ step” forward, blades biting at your boots, annihilating everything in your path, anthills, orb-spider webs six feet across, wasp nests–towards the diseased water. “I don’t wanna!” Hit. “You don’t wanna!” Hit. “But we gotta!” Hit. “Fo’ step!” You perch on the perilous edge, and strike at the swamp grass in the shallows, averting your face from your jade reflection, as clods rain in this putrid River Styx, and pretend you don’t exist; that you were never born; that your body is just a tractor, a machine, and not a living thing with you in it.
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