Free Sweet Hell on Fire by Sara Lunsford Page A

This was not a new thing. All three of us were hard-asses. We’d all been baptized by fire and come through the other side whole and hearty. None of us took any shit, or were mealymouthed about our expectations or treated any one inmate different than another. We were good officers.
    But there was our Captain, crying about how unfair it was to the one guy who’d be down there, who would have to stand showers and do any stripouts that came in. Five minutes of nuts and butts while we had to do all of the cell searches and everything else? Cry me a river. Somebody’s vag was sandy, but it didn’t belong to any one of the three of us.
    Everyone backed away from us as we looked at each other, processing. Almost like the way you’d back up from a hungry lion—careful, hoping the predator doesn’t notice your movement and pounce.
    The relief OIC, a woman in her early fifties, who was like an angry bull when crossed, hopped on it immediately. “Well, since we’re just women, why don’t you come down to Seg and show us what we’re supposed to do? I don’t think we can figure it out all by ourselves. Do you?” She turned to look us.
    “No, I don’t think we can manage,” I said. “I have a vagina; therefore, I am incapable of doing my job.”
    He narrowed his eyes at us, as if there were some doubt as to whether we were serious.
    “Lunsford,” the male who would be assigned with us said under his breath. “I know you really have a dick. Even if he doesn’t.”
    It made me laugh, but I was still pissed off at what the Captain had said. Not just because it was a slur against women. I can even understand why men didn’t trust women as easily as other men in that environment. I’d seen firsthand too many women throw away their careers because some shit bag told them they were pretty.
    I didn’t like it, but I understood it. But this Captain, he’d seen my work. He knew I was a good officer. He knew the other two were good officers, and he knew we had good, solid reputations.
    We discussed it the whole way to the cell house. A couple of inmates from other cell houses yelled greetings to us on our way in and asked us about the weather, how we were doing, just looking to be acknowledged. My OIC told them she didn’t know and couldn’t figure it out because she was a woman. There were echoes of “fuck that” and “we’re fucked” the rest of the walk in. The inmates wanted nothing to do with us when we acted faux helpless. That was the calm before the storm. They knew we were pissed and wanted no part of it.
    We hadn’t been on duty for fifteen minutes when the first call came asking us what cells we had open for someone who’d popped off at the mouth before shift change. We informed the Captain that we didn’t know because we were girls and didn’t belong in Segregation. We asked him, in unison, to please send us a big, strong man to help us. When he could locate one.
    For women who couldn’t do the job, we pulled our own weight in contraband out of the cell house that day. The biggest find was the serrated blade we found in the cell of an inmate known to be HIV positive and who hated officers. It wasn’t unheard of for inmates to stick themselves and then use their blood as a weapon.
    What scared us wasn’t that he’d had it. There was all manner of shit hidden all around the prison at any given time. It was where we were and how he’d gotten it.
    Segregation was supposed to be the jail within the jail. It was supposed to be more secure than the rest of the prison. Inmates and their belongings were searched constantly. When inmates were brought into Seg, they were stripped naked and had a flashlight shined up their noses, in their ears, down their throats and up their asses. That blade was too big to be smuggled in the prison wallet (anus).
    So either someone hadn’t searched his property, or some dirty motherfucker brought it in for him.

My mother finally heard back from her doctor. He suspected