Prism

PRISM

by S.D. Brown

(Content Warnings: Physical violence, racism, cancer, death, prison/solitary confinement, state seizure of child)

Joseph entered the world with a large birthmark on his right cheek. They cut the cord, wiped his body clean, and snatched him from me before I memorized the scent of his newborn skin. After delivery, a prison nurse took pity; she slipped me a piece of the blanket used to swaddle Joseph.

I hid the cut of cloth beneath my pillow, and for weeks I breathed in the lingering baby smell as I slept in my jail cell. My dreams of Joseph grew so real that I’d wake up cradling my plastic pillow in the middle of the night.

Sometimes, I’d play music to quiet the nightmare of losing him.

When my cellmate Shirley discovered my temporary escape—my prism—she demanded the secret keys. I refused, so Shirley stole the only piece of Joseph given to me in this federal penitentiary. She flushed my baby’s cloth down the toilet.

Now I’ve lost Joseph’s baby smell, and I worry the scent of jail saturates his skin.

•••

 Mama was a spider woman; as a girl, I believed she’d been bitten and infected with a gift to weave yarn-like webs. I would watch as her fingers and wrists flicked, and her needles clicked as she rocked in a chair by the living room window. “Stay out of trouble, Lorraine,” she said before I rushed through the front door. “And put on a sweater.”

During spring, Los Angeles rarely rose above eighty degrees. Mama took pride in the clothes she knitted for me. I didn’t have the option of wearing store-bought digs, so many kids at school made fun of my fashion. 

We waited for Daddy to come home from work. Mama knitted inside the house, watching me from a window while I skipped rope on the sidewalk, sweating under the bulk of my homemade sweater. I counted the number of jumps over cement until I spotted Daddy’s Dodge turning on our block.

He parked the car. “Evening, angel.” Daddy strode over and jumped rope with me. Unlike my mother, he always joined in on the fun. “Still no wings? When’s my girl gonna learn how to fly?”

 “I can jump high, Daddy. Watch me!” I tossed the rope overhead and leapt off the concrete with all the flight I could muster. In midair, Daddy scooped me into his arms, kissed my cheek, and carried me inside. Sweat and fish wafted from my father’s skin. He worked at San Pedro’s seaport and the odour lingered in his clothes.

Daddy set me down by the door and attempted to hug Mama. She threatened him with a needle. “You stink.” Daddy turned towards the bathroom to get clean, but Mama draped a newly knitted scarf around his neck. 

She spun him around as if reeling in a fish. She inched on her toes and pecked him on the lips. “Woman, you’re too much!” he said as they embraced. That’s how they expressed their love, through push and pull.

Our meals always consisted of fish, whatever Daddy could bring home for free. I grew tired of tuna and begged for hamburgers or spaghetti. Mama poked me in the arm with the sharp end of her needle. “Don’t be ungrateful. Learn to love what life gives you.”

After suffering through another seafood dinner, Daddy rewarded me with a Twinkie. He peeled the plastic quietly and passed me half of his sponge cake. We crammed dessert in our mouths while Mama washed our plates.

After our meal, we gathered in the living room where Daddy smoked his pipe and read the newspaper with jazz wafting from our record player. We didn’t have a black-and-white TV, so Mama made her own entertainment. 

She tried teaching me a beginner’s stitch, but I never could get it right. Most nights, I fell asleep in my father’s lap to the aroma of sweet tobacco. Mama hated Daddy’s smoke. She always said that pipe would be the death of him.

•••

The jail cell could’ve fit inside my childhood room with space to spare. I arrived pregnant in my last trimester and a few semesters short of a college degree.

I met my cellmate early that morning. “You sleep on the bottom. You got that shit?” Shirley laid back down and held a magazine over her head. “And I don’t wanna hear you snoring, or I swear to God I’ll punch your throat.”

The first night, I was too scared to sleep. A cold draft curled through our cell. I sobbed as Shirley grinded her teeth. The sound haunted me more than if she had snored like a bear.

I hated her, but I loved the son I was carrying. He kicked all through the night, but I didn’t mind because I felt less alone. Rubbing my belly was a great comfort. If only I’d known his delivery would be so soon.

•••

When the cancer consumed Daddy, I sat by his side, clutching his hand. My mother’s grip on her needles tightened, as if she were trying to keep my father from slipping out of our lives. Her click, click, clicking kept time to the ventilator. 

“You’re my angel, baby girl.” He released his last breath, and the hospital staff turned off the machines. The only sound left in the room came from my mother’s incessant knitting.

I turned and snatched the needles from her hand, screamed at her to do something. I wanted to stitch her fingers together, anything to stop them from knitting. Mama gathered her things and drove us home. That night, she started a new blanket with white yarn. 

I never saw her cry.

•••

A teacher encouraged us to write about our crimes, our past lives. “Who was that girl? Do you remember the child you once were? Think of your happiest memory. Recall that time through your words.”

I chewed on my pencil as she walked around the room. She stopped at my desk. “I’ve been reading your work. You should think about enrolling in our certificate program. Just because you’re here doesn’t mean you can’t finish your education.”

I just smiled and dug my teeth into the pencil. We weren’t allowed pens for fear we’d disassemble the parts. I pretended like I needed to think long and hard about her questions, hoping she would get the hint and take a hike to another desk. 

“What did you want to be when you were a girl? Tell me about your happiest memory!” She practically begged me.

I just wanted to get her off my back. “I loved music, okay?”

She perked up. “Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin—who’s your favorite?” 

I sighed. “I wanted to play the harp.”

Two desks over, Shirley snorted. “When you ever seen Negroes playing harps?”

Shirley’s friend butted in the conversation. “She probably thinks Jesus and all the angels are Black, too.”

My teacher straightened her spine. “There’s no need for name-calling,” she said. “We’re all allowed to dream. I think it’s wonderful that you wanted to play the harp, Lorraine. It’s never too late to take lessons. Someday.” She smiled.

•••

A week after my father’s death, my eighth-grade class took a field trip to watch the Los Angeles Philharmonic practice in their music hall. 

They crammed a class of kids onto a dusty bus and shuttled us to an afternoon of classical music. White-only signs still hung outside stores, but inside the music hall, I found a different world. 

A few of us gaped at the high ceilings. Some of my classmates, bored with wordless tunes, orchestrated a game of telephone and passed silly messages down the row. I ignored the game, mesmerized by the best part—hearing a woman play the harp. 

The sound and its form entranced me: the shape of the wood arching and curving high into a wing; the way she leaned her shoulder into its heft, as if stitching herself to a heavenly appendage, made me want to press my body with all my might against the instrument.

The music plucked from her strings rushed through me, and something inside my chest broke, unlocking a hope I hadn’t felt since my dad’s burial. Everything in the room dissolved, and I thought that I could fly with the notes.

At the end of rehearsal, our tour guide allowed us to walk the stage. I hid at the back of the line. As my class disappeared through the exit, I stretched my arm out to the musical wing and pulled its taut strings. The melody melted through me. Our tour guide spun his head around and glared, but I didn’t care.

I ran home that day and asked Mama to pay for music lessons; never mind that she hadn’t paid all of Daddy’s funeral expenses. 

She rocked in her chair, still knitting her white afghan. “We don’t have money for music lessons, Lorraine. I keep trying to teach you to knit for free. How’re you gonna learn to play a harp if you can’t even make a proper stitch? Now knitting—there’s a skill you can use. No matter how cold your family gets, you’ll know how to keep them warm.”

That shit pissed me off. “Angels don’t need sweaters, Mama. They got big wings to keep them warm. If Daddy was here, he’d know what I was talking about.”

Mama kept clashing her needles. “You, Miss Thing, have got a bit of the devil in you. That’s why I keep you close. Now go in the kitchen and start the oven. Daddy’ll be home soon.”

Mama often made mistakes like that, forgetting that Dad had died. 

Later that night, I stole her knitting needles and taped them over an open box. I turned the cardboard on its side, pretending to play a harp, but the needles were too hard, too thick. Next, I stole my mother’s comb, the bone porcelain one my grandmother gifted her. I broke off the teeth and tied them together with strings, still trying to fashion my own harp. Finally, I fell asleep on my bedroom floor, exhausted from crafting homemade instruments.

I woke up to Mama’s belt cutting across my legs, my arms, my chest. Her tears seared the welts on my skin. That beating broke a silence I thought she’d buried with Daddy. That beating unleashed the best of the devil in me. 

I didn’t know then what I know now—that my mother was just trying to beat the want out, the desire that kept me dissatisfied with everything. She needed me to be more like her: happy with what we had.

Mama and I didn’t talk much after that, and I stopped asking for things. Daddy’s spirit in heaven wasn’t going to transform me into an angel any faster than my mother’s knitting needles would spin her into a spider. 

I miss them mostly at night in my cell, miss the quiet times we shared in the living room after dinner. If either of them were alive now, I wouldn’t have lost my baby to the state. Joseph could’ve been raised by family. I imagine Mama would’ve knitted clothes for her grandson. 

She would’ve done everything in her power to keep him warm.

•••

One summer night, Shirley’s teeth-grinding sawed through me. I couldn’t sleep. I rolled out of my bottom bunk and stretched my arms to the ceiling. I padded softly across the cell with nowhere to go. 

A shoebox-sized window, too high to see through, rested in a wall of our cell. I stretched on my toes, but still couldn’t get a view of the outside world.

I walked to the other side of the cell and pressed my cheek against the bars. The metal cooled my face. I reached out my arm and glided my fingers across each one. My strumming didn’t make a sound, but in my head, I heard the tinkling of melodious waves, a rush of musical notes like an ocean swirling towards me.

I spun around, clutching my chest as my heart pounded. I held my body stiff, listening to Shirley’s incessant teeth grinding.

I took a deep breath, turning my back on Shirley again, and I pressed my shoulder into the cell’s bars, the way I remembered watching the musician stitch herself to that harp. I strummed my fingertips across: One, two, three... one, two, three. 

The notes moved through me like a breeze stirring wind chimes. When I turned around in my cell, the window stretched down, down, down into the shape of a rectangle, tall enough to walk through. The window’s plexiglass twisted and shifted, and a bright light streamed through the prism.

I stood and stared in awe. After a few seconds, the doorway receded, shrinking back into its original length and shape. The prism disappeared. The music in my head faded. Morning neared.  

I crawled back into bed, trying to memorize the notes I’d played: one, two, three. Tomorrow night, I would find out what lay beyond that door.

•••

Our house became a web. Skeins of yarn uncoiled from the banister, lamps, crisscrossed every surface of our home. A year after my dad died, my mother was no closer to finishing her white afghan. 

The length of her blanket filled the living room floor, spilled into the dining room, and lapped the edge of our kitchen. A cobweb of white strands threatened to drown us. 

On the surface, the yarn was mostly clean, but when I lifted the corner and peeked underneath, dust caked the fibers. I was too embarrassed to have friends over—not that I had many.

Mama didn’t have company either. We lived, just the three of us: mom, me, and a blob of yarn growing a million arms inside our home. One night, the anger bubbled over. I crept downstairs. Mama’s head rolled to the side as she slept in Daddy’s old chair, covered by her dingy layers. 

I snuck into the kitchen, slid open a drawer, and pawed the sharpest pair of scissors I could find. From the kitchen door, I sliced and sliced through the sea of yarn. I watched the threads split between the blades, slip from my fingers. 

The next morning, Mama woke to find her blanket in pieces. A deeper sadness must’ve buried itself inside her because she never knitted again.

•••

Keeping track of dates in jail wasn’t easy. Every day felt the same. But I know the night after I discovered the prism, my portal, I waited for Shirley to fall asleep and grind her teeth. 

I leaned against the cell bars and plucked the metal strings again. The music echoed only through my ears as the window silently inched its way down. Down, down, down. 

I walked through the prism and found myself standing in my prison scrubs near a park bench. In the distance, a group of boys beat up a kid beneath a basketball hoop. He cradled himself on the asphalt, protecting his head until the group got bored and moved to another court.

The kid brushed dirt and blood from his face. I spotted the blotch—my baby boy’s birthmark on his cheek. The mother in me wanted to run to his rescue; the inmate in me wanted to teach him how to fight back, to take a stand so he would avoid pitfalls later in life. 

I stared at the boy I believed was Joseph, and tears welled in my eyes. He couldn’t have been any older than six years old. I’d lost so much time.

I approached the court and reached my hand down to help him. As easy as a mother to her son, he slipped his hand into mine. I hoisted him off the ground and onto his feet. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Joseph. But I didn’t do nothin’.”

My heart warmed. “You look just like your grandfather, Joseph.”

He took a step away from me. “You know my grandparents?”

“Well, they were my parents. They’re gone now. Joseph, I’m your Mom.”

I didn’t know if it was the horror of meeting me unexpectedly, but Joseph punched my stomach and ran away before I could tell him the whole story; he ran before I could promise to meet him again. 

I chased him, but my portal only allowed me to reach so far. Time’s plexiglass hand plucked me from the park and tossed me back into my cell. I pressed my lips together, swallowing the urge to scream.

Sharp cuts etched across my arms. Blood seeped from the abrasions. Going through the glass had been smooth, but the trip back left me scarred. 

Shirley coughed and shifted in her sleep as I shivered on the cell floor. It took a while to gather my strength, to lift myself from the ground. To have experienced that freedom, only to have my wings clipped? It felt wrong. I hobbled to our sink and wrapped my cuts in rough toilet paper, intent on finding my way back to Joseph.

•••

One day, while minding my goddamn business, Shirley pulled up a chair behind me in the recreation room. I pretended not to smell her tangy breath against my neck. 

She whispered behind my ear, “I saw you.”

•••

The next time I met Joseph, he had grown much older, but his birthmark never changed. He stood alone on a corner in front of what I guessed was his school. I hid near a tree across the street, afraid to approach him, unsure he would remember me.

I didn’t want to scare him again. Based on his height, I figured he was at least twelve years old; six years since I’d last seen him. I stepped out of the tree’s shadow. Something about me must’ve caught his eye. His gaze locked onto mine. 

He waved. I did the same. 

My heart leaped as he ran across the street and stopped short of hugging me. “You’re so big,” I said. “How’d you know it was me?”

Joseph tilted his head. “That day, I turned around and you disappeared. I searched the grass where you stood and found a pile of glass covered in blood. I memorized your face ever since,” he said.

I never wanted to leave his side again. “Can I hug you?”

Joseph squinted to shield his eyes from the afternoon sun. He stood there for a long time and finally nodded. We embraced. “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said.

“No, I understand. I would’ve been scared, too.” I squeezed his shoulder and pulled away. “Where do you live now?  Is the foster home treating you alright?”

Joseph nodded. “I was adopted.”

Worry shot through me. “Are they here to pick you up from school?”

Joseph looked to the left and right of the street. “They couldn’t today. I’m supposed to take the bus. It’s not far. My parents found your information in my foster records. They said I can  write to you if I want.”

“Do you want to?” I asked.

Joseph shrugged. “I dunno. I guess you’re my mom, too.”

Before I could tell him more about myself, the plexiglass pulled me back to my cell. More cuts crisscrossed my arms and legs. 

The picture of bloody glass piled before Joseph was haunting. I didn’t want that to be his last memory of me: shards etched like jagged, crimson feathers at his feet.

•••

The more I used that portal, the more my body unraveled. Wrinkles withered the corners of my mouth. A cough lingered in my chest. Winter rolled around and I lost all sense of time.  1965, 1973, 1979—swimming back and forth through years confused me. My skin began to sag; the bones in my body creaked.

But I couldn’t keep away. Joseph was my son, and I deserved to see him. 

I stole time, and time stole parts of me. Each time I stepped through that prism, I came back a little older while others around me barely aged. 

I gladly paid that cost. 

•••

The fight erupted the night I found Joseph’s baby cloth stolen. Shirley pretended to fall asleep—only I thought she really had drifted into her dreams. I couldn’t see the cocky grin on her face as she waited in her top bunk, pretending to grind her teeth.

Anxiety gripped me. Shirley’s words still echoed through my head. I saw you. I saw youuuuu. Correctional officers organized regular shakedowns. Word somehow got around about mischief, bright lights coming from a cell at night, and no one knew when they would conduct a search. I was sure they had been tipped off by Shirley.

I tried to relax, reaching beneath my pillow to retrieve Joseph’s baby cloth, the only solid reminder left of my son. My hand prodded the sheet; a rough paper poked my finger. I lifted my pillow and found a note.

Slowly, I unfolded the paper and squinted in the dark to read the scribble: I saw you. Give me the keys, or you’ll never see your little things again. 

My chest burned. My stomach ached. 

I rolled out the bottom bunk. My feet pounded the floor. I reached over and grabbed Shirley, clutching a fistful of her hair. “Where’s my baby’s blanket?” I demanded, trying to keep my voice low. Shirley kicked me, and I fell to the floor. 

Before I could get up, she flushed Joseph’s cloth. 

I lost my shit. 

I found the strength to body slam her to the ground.  I locked my knees to the sides of her hips, pinning her to the cement as I pummeled my fists into her face. 

Shirley twisted her arm, reaching behind her back. It all happened so fast. I didn’t see the plastic blade, a comb sharpened into a knife, plunge into my side. Shirley stabbed me on the arm, stabbed me in my womb. 

I rolled off of her and curled into a ball on the floor. A few inmates woke from the commotion.

Keys clattered; cell bars opened. The smell of hot pepper wafted through the air and burned my eyes. A dull throb sunk in my ears as I coughed to catch my breath. In and out, my head swam through the pain. Someone lifted me onto a gurney. 

I reached out, arm covered in blood, and stroked the cell bars. Fingerprints smeared the metal. My prison harp’s musical notes cut short and faded away before I could complete the sequence.

The next time I awoke, a doctor told me I would never conceive again.

•••

Now, I live in solitary confinement, away from Shirley and all the other inmates.

I don’t know how long they’ll keep me locked inside of here. There are no bars that I can stroke, no musical notes to play, no window to reveal the outside world. No prism.

But I wait, patiently, listening to the silence. 

There are times when the officers’ cell keys sing to me from their rings. There are times when I carve my nail into the wall, drawing lines as straight as the strings of a harp. I run my fingers across the grooves of crumbling cement.

My fate is not bound to this room. I may have lost more time, but I’m still alive. 

One night, I start to hum, moan, and shout as if my body is an instrument and each beat of my heart lifts my imaginary wings. I rise and stretch out my hands, plucking the stale air, which seems to flicker. A spark of light hovers in the center of my cell. It swells and swells and swells into a prism. 

I am the key, and I run towards that light, smiling, determined to find my son.