Free We Ate the Road Like Vultures by Lynnette Lounsbury

watched a porn movie once and found it so terrifyingly sad that I cried, those girls with their wide-open, made-up faces begging for it with their mouths, begging for a quick death with their eyes. It turned me off sex for weeks. Well, maybe days, I am still a teenager, I think about sex most of the time though my bubble of lust and romance was being rapidly burst by the couple in the corner. He moaned suddenly and clutched her to him, rising like a cobra and collapsing onto her back so she had to hold tighter to the wall to keep herself from hitting the floor. He pulled himself out quickly, slapped her buttocks and handed her a piece of bread from his filthy pants’ pocket. Without letting the long hair reveal her face, she grabbed the piece of bread with one hand and smoothed down her skirt with the other, retreating to another piece of bare walland sinking down to my level. I saw her eyes for a moment and she was angry. Angrier than most of the world knows about. I put my head down and let it rest on my knees, thoughts banging the sides of my skull. To fuck for bread she must have been in there for weeks and, since nobody knew where I was, I might be doing it myself in a few days. I felt nauseous for a whole variety of reasons and my stomach and bowels were starting to clench in that Mexican way. I knew if it got worse it would not be fear but some sort of gastric torment that would see me back over the toilet hole in a hell of a lot more distress than the piss had cost me. I tried to get a grip of myself, but when one of the younger men came over and squatted in front of me asking questions in Spanish, and touching my damp twisted hair with his hands, I panicked. I reached out and slapped his arm away. His friends laughed and whistled and he pushed me off my balance against the wall, one hand holding my shoulder down, the other grabbing my breast. I responded with the most violence I could manage, which was to vomit powerfully in his face and chest. He let go immediately, kicked mehard in the thigh and went back to his howling friends trying to brush off his clothes. The smell was hideous and I covered my face with my hands to try and get away from it before I threw up again. The smell of the dead body was still much worse, so I wasn’t vilified as much as despised, but I sat still and silent for so long I couldn’t tell if I slept or not. Finally the cell door opened and more water and a tub of beans was pushed through. The inmates ate it with their hands, protecting their places with slapping so nobody noticed when the guard grabbed my upper arm and heaved me out the door. I shook him off and walked, as best I could, in front of him while he sniggered and poked his finger into my back every few seconds. We reached a door and I waited for him to open it, which he didn’t, and we stood there for an interminable amount of time, his finger maintaining an unreasonable amount of pressure on my lower back and my mind wandering around all the dreadful and fantastical options of what could be behind the door. My sojourn in the Mexican penal system sofar suggested it would be nothing of any solace or comfort.
    The door swung door swung open and I was pushed into a small and bare office with a hanging light bulb that glazed the room in brilliant yellow and the captain from our arrest was sitting lazily back in a blue plastic chair, one foot resting on the other knee and bouncing slightly in a dangerously ready rhythm. I walked fully into the room, prepared for the worst, to discover he was not alone. There was another chair in the corner, another dangerously taut body, another contender for my soul. Carousel.
    I sagged with relief, knowing that no matter his wrath at my hunting him down like a snow leopard, he wouldn’t wish me dead or raped or even to sit any longer in a room full of death and shit. I met his eyes for as long as I dared and knew my only role was to keep silent, something I am not good at or