Free The Hand That Feeds You by A.J. Rich

my mouth, pried my legs apart with his knee, and in an instant I was no longer a virgin. He finished quickly and I was still alive. He was inside me when the door opened—Candice with the Coors.
    “You fucker, you were supposed to wait.”
    “Well, if you hadn’t dragged your ass getting back . . .”
    In spite of that, she cracked open a can and handed it to him. She cracked a second can and took a long gulp. She then opened a third and put it on the floor beside me.
    “What, you’re a hostess now?” Doug asked.
    “She’s got to be thirsty, too. Right, Morgan?”
    Without ceremony, she produced a Swiss Army knife and cut one hand free. I was able to sit up, and when I did, my T-shirt dropped to cover me. The thought of having a beer with them was sickening, but I could not risk provoking them. I reached for the can and made myself swallow a small amount.
    Candice looked at the alarm clock on the bureau I was still taped to. “You better think about heading in to work.”
    “I got a clean shirt here? Don’t tell me you’ve been in Cleveland.”
    Candice went to the small closet and threw a long-sleeved shirt at him.
    “Are you going to have time to drop her back at the bus station?” Candice asked.
    She cut my other wrist free, gave me back my duffel, and I was hustled into a white panel van. On the drive to what I hoped would be Port Authority, Doug kept the radio on to an oldies station, one power anthem after another. I was grateful I didn’t have to talk to him. I was sitting in the rear of the van watching him nod his head in time to the music.
    When we reached Port Authority, Doug turned off the radio. “When I let you out, don’t turn around until the count of sixty. Unless you want to see me again.”
    I didn’t turn around for the count of six hundred.
    •  •  •
    The moment the lecture ended, Amabile took my hand. “Come with me.” He pulled me away from the classroom before anyone had a chance to talk to me. He said he had an extra helmet for me and offered a ride to Rikers on his Harley. He and I both had patients this time each week, and I had a lot of catching up to do. I had never intended to be a practicing psychologist, but seven hundred clinical hours were required for the degree. Rikers wasn’t a prison; it was a jail, which meant that the inmates were there awaiting trial or serving less than a year. My patients were guys hoping that by seeing a shrink, the trial judge would look on them favorably. Since most of the Rikers population (fourteen thousand on an average day) was awaiting trial, everyone there was “innocent.”
    I held fast to Amabile’s waist as we sped over the unmarked Francis Buono Bridge from Queens—the only access to the island. In the orientation session we had learned that Rikers Island had been a military training ground during the Civil War. It became a jail in 1932.
    In 1957, Northeast Airlines Flight 823 crashed onto the island shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport, killing twenty and injuring seventy-eight out of a total of ninety-five passengers and six crew. Shortly after the crash, department personnel and inmates alike ran to the crash site to help survivors. As a result of their actions, of the fifty-seven inmates who assisted with the rescue effort, thirty were released and sixteen received a reduction of six months by the NYC parole board.
    We also learned that a drawing by Salvador Dalí, done as an apology because he was unable to attend a talk about art for the prisoners, hung in the inmate dining room from 1965 to 1981, when it was moved to the prison lobby for safekeeping. The drawing was stolen in 2003 by some guards and replaced with a fake.
    The facility was something of a small town. There were schools, medical clinics, ball fields, chapels, gyms, drug-rehab programs, grocery stores, barbershops, a bakery, a Laundromat, a power plant, a track, a tailor shop, a print shop, a bus depot, and even a car wash. It was the