Sing Her Down: A Novel

PART I

DIOS

See your tree, Florida. See it bowing and bending under the smothered sky. Wind-whipped and swaying. See it through the scratched glass—the work of blades and nails and night after night of desperation. Rain hammered and storm tortured.

You got the white-girl blues again, Florida. I know. I can tell through these walls. I can feel from my own cell next door. I can vibe you vibrating with your hurt—a deep chord that shakes the cinder block like the bass on a car radio.

You’re heavy into that I don’t belong here shit.

But this is exactly where you belong.

Rich girls like you, Florida—blinder than the rest by far.

Yours is not one of those hard-pity tales that make the privileged feel as if they’ve moonlit in a rough world. Yours isn’t the story that makes women like your mother shed phony tears— if only for a moment—at the injustices in the world.

You don’t need a good look to know that that particular song has been sung in here too many times—nearly every bunk filled with a woman wronged on the outside, wronged by the system, wronged on the inside. Wrong begetting wrong like dominos on their way down.

Who will tell our stories, Florida?

Who will listen to the song of a cold heart?

Who will sing, Pero nunca se fijaron / En tan humilde señora?

See your tree bowing down until it nearly breaks. Marking time and passing the seasons, budding and blooming and shedding. See your tree for two years and five months, twenty-two days and a handful of hours. Your sentence ticking away until completion.

And tonight, in the throes of the storm, in the arms of the kind of violence that fills your dreams, see your tree battling the wind, rain, and sand that rip through this flat desert state. Like Daphne, rooted strong against the assault of her unwanted lover.

You still watching? You still watching, Florida? You still… I can hear Kace’s rambling from here. Because Marta says it’s no good to watch. Marta says that’s how the devil gets in. Marta says he’s watching you from the tree. Marta says you’re inviting him in. You want the devil, Florida? You want him?

Enough about Marta, you tell her.

I can hear the heavy thud as Kace pounds the bunk with her fist, punching you through the springs and flimsy mattress. You recoil to the wall. I feel the bang.

Now listen.

Listen to Kace hearing voices. Listen to her talking back and talking for them. For part of the night or, worse, the whole night. Listen until you know those voices too, like they’re your friends. A crazed chorus wailing at the walls of a fallen city. A whole bunch of mad Furies.

So listen to them and her and miss them when they’re not around and she’s deadly quiet, scary in her silence. Listen to them because you think it’s better than listening to me.

I fear women with nonlinear anger, you told me, back when we lived together. Before you moved out and your old cellie Tina moved in.

You think anger moves from point A to point B like a formula? I asked. You think there’s always derivation. Derivation shut you right up.

You had imagined you were the educated one in here.

Kace is anything but linear. So let her talk all night if she needs. I’m just next door and it drives me crazy.

But that was the transfer that was available, so you took it. Anything to create space between us, you thought. Anything to rip you from me—from the you you saw in me.

You should have paid more attention to the old stories. Fate is fated.

Nothing you can fucking do about that.

We will meet at the crossroads.

You think you are unique in your appreciation for the finer things—contrails that cross-streak the sky at sunset, a scattershot of buds erupting on your tree, the soft swallow as the desert rain hits the dry earth.

I know how close you hold them because I listened to you go on and on about how this place was not your place. How you can’t breathe, can’t feel, can’t sense properly—as if your senses are keener. I know you think these people are not your people and your crimes not your crimes. I listened to you make everyone else’s excuses for what you did.

Except I know that your guilt runs deeper than the story crafted for you. A small detail no bigger than a matchbook. I know because Tina told me. And I know more than that.

You’re no victim, Florida.

There was the summer you spent in Israel that you paid for by smuggling diamonds into Luxembourg. And the year abroad in Amsterdam, where you fraudulently signed your name to mortgage papers that secured bad loans for grifters.

Then there was what brought you in here—accomplice to murder after the fact. Drove the getaway car from a fire that left two bodies burning in the desert. Like you didn’t know.

Inside, they call you Florida because of the color you dye your hair—jailhouse blond.

Florence isn’t a name for in here. So you keep ruining your hair with the cheap bleach.

It’s raining a hard desert rain, a monsoon so powerful you can almost feel it through the thick windows—a rhythm so fierce that it’s inside us. The storm surges like an advancing battalion, cleansing the air of the nightly noise of everyone up and down the block. A purge.

Kace is talking. Marta is talking back. The tree is swaying silent.

Lightning splinters the sky, cracking it like a rock kicked into a windshield, x-raying the yard and the fence.

Now, I can barely hear you two above the storm. I close my eyes and lie back on my bunk, thankful I don’t have to listen tonight.

In the morning the storm has left a low-slung sky. Because of the rain, we all slept well, able to forget one another for a second.

We wake to the regular sounds, to women hollering down the halls. Calling from bunk to bunk and cell to cell. The coughing too—we wake to that.

The window is dirt-streaked and spattered with water stains.

The yard is mud.

The tree is gone.

I’ll let you tell the rest.

FLORIDA

Last night’s storm raised hell. The electricity from the lightning lingers in the blocks and coils around the bars of each cell Florida passes, ramping up a tension that you can almost see vibrating down the line. More cells than normal remain occupied at mealtimes—more and more older women are hanging back from group activities, buying their meals in the canteen and eating on their bunks.

But even at reduced capacity, the cafeteria is charged with a current that reveals itself in spikes and ripples of activity, small explosions of noise, dropped trays and spilled drinks. As Florida fills her plate, she notices the room has grown strangely silent, the customary chatter receding to nothing. Only a cough breaks the calm.

At the sound the women flinch and scatter like they’ve heard a gunshot. Then it is still again—a sure sign of a quiet storm brewing.

Florida’s eyes shift, careful to land on no one and nothing. Head down. Business to herself. She slides into a seat next to Mel-Mel, a woman innocuous except for her size, and occupies herself with the nothing-doing of her breakfast.

Unsex me now, bitch!

Diana Diosmary Sandoval jumps back from her seat, arms wide, stomping her foot for the room’s attention. The guards lift their eyes at trouble on the boil, but no sooner has she assumed her stance than they look away.

What happens next will be swift and painful. Dios has barbed wire in her veins one second, mercury the next.

I said, unsex me now, motherfucker.

Florida is too close to this action. Dios’s eyes land on hers.

Then Dios smiles, mean and mirthless, a quick flash of her perfect teeth. If it weren’t for her regulation orange, it would seem as if Dios has wandered in from a different world—a place of cleanliness and order and the luxury to focus on the superficial details. Beneath her obsidian hair, her high forehead is a polished orb. Her eyebrows are painted arches. Her eyes are cold green stones. Her skin glows golden with an inner heat.

She steps toward Florida’s table, positioning herself just behind Mel-Mel. Florida flinches at the sight of the fork in her grip.

At least the mountain of Mel-Mel is between them—an undulation of soft peaks in bright orange, a physical manifestation of Mel-Mel’s personality, malleable and gullible, a pawn, never a player.

Florida knows some of the COs aren’t paying attention or are looking away on purpose in deference to a deal sealed in the kitchen or chapel with a handshake, a trade-off, a handoff, a dirty exchange. Some might even be looking on with perverse pleasure, eager for the fight, aching to seeing Diana Diosmary Sandoval in her element.

They can’t hide that they love it when the women throw down, especially when it’s a woman like Dios—someone who outclasses them on the outside but whose status in here forces her to bite her tongue at their rude talk. They permit her to fight, Florida thinks, because it reduces her to their animal level.

Dios raises the fist with the fork. She feints toward Florida, lurching over Mel-Mel’s head. Then she cracks her nasty smile again. Florida doesn’t flinch.

You take your beatings when they come. Sometimes you only discover their reason later.

How badly will this hurt? Will it be as bad as the beatdowns Florida took when she came inside—the poundings that left a watercolor of blue and purple cascading from neck to hip? Will it pulse and ring for weeks, resonate with its own throbbing sound, a brutal, percussive cacophony, like the concussion she received at the hands of a guard in the shower? Or will it be its own sort of art? A contrast in metallics, the cold, sharp tines of the fork in her skin and the iron taste of blood on her tongue.

But then, there’s a moment, a hairsbreadth passage between Dios and Florida, when Dios relaxes her grip on the fork, when it hangs loose in her grasp, when she turns and fixes her stare on Mel-Mel and when Florida knows what’s coming isn’t coming for her.

Then Dios holds out the fork toward Florida. In Dios’s eyes, a challenge to take up the mantle, to finish what she is about to start.

Come on, Florida, Dios says, her voice the sharp suggestion that inflicting pain is pleasure. You know you want to.

Florida keeps her face blank.

Have it your way, Dios says. A quick upward flicker of her painted eyebrows and Dios’s hand is tight on the fork again. With her eyes locked on Florida, Dios reaches around Mel-Mel and plunges the fork into her cheek, instantly reaping furrows of blood. She presses down, punctuating her strike. Then she rakes the tines toward Mel-Mel’s jaw.

Florida imagines the sound of ripping flesh like tearing fabric, a gruesome pop-pop of stitches bursting. But she can’t hear it over Mel-Mel’s brief scream, which is quickly muffled as Dios covers her mouth with her free hand. Then she twists the fork, twirling the shredded flesh into a mangled spiral.

Mel-Mel’s blood rushes over Dios’s hand. Dios keeps twisting like she wants to pull all the loose skin of Mel-Mel’s cheek into a bloody whirlpool, drawing her eye bags and second chin closer and closer to the gory core.

Dios lets go, leaving the fork in Mel-Mel’s cheek. She steps back from the table. Mel-Mel raises her hand to her mauled flesh, her mouth flopping open and closed like a fish gasping for