I’m still trying to process everything that happened since they arrested me at my own door. The way they invaded my apartment. How they gathered enough evidence to make anything I could say in my defense completely pointless.
One officer tells me to sit. Another walks past as if I’m already nothing. The hours blur. They take my earrings. My watch. My necklace.
“Personal belongings.”
Then it escalates. A female officer, her face blank with indifference, points to a filthy curtain in the corner. “Strip. Squat. Cough.”
“What?” I ask, convinced I misheard.
She doesn’t blink. “All of it off. Squat three times.”
I obey. Shaking. I hold the sobs in my throat, feeling undignified in a way I never was before. Under the fluorescent lights, humiliation stops being something I inflicted on people I thought were beneath me. It becomes my own form of punishment as a stranger inspects my body, treating me like trash. Like nothing that deserves the least bit of respect.
They photograph me holding a placard. My name dissolves into a number. My face becomes data. Another officer calls out something that isn’t my name, just a sequence of digits, and I stand.
More doors. More corridors. The same sick beige. The sound changes at the women’s unit. Voices bleed through the walls. Hollow laughter. Screams without warning. They tell me the cell isn’t mine yet.
“Intake.”
I’m placed in a holding space with six other women. Not a room, a concrete pit. There aren’t even enough bunks or mattresses. This shithole makes me want to puke. It reeks of old sweat, pee, and cheap disinfectant.
I sit on the edge of a metal bench, the last empty spot. Hands folded. Spine straight as I avoid looking at any of them. One approaches. Bad neck tattoo. Hollow eyes. She steps into my space like she owns it.
“First time?”
I nod.
She studies me as the others stop what they were doing to watch us. “What’d you do?”
I hesitate, grasping for something to say. They laugh.
“With that pretty face, I bet you’re a pen thief,” she says. “So… small or big?”
“I didn’t take anything,” I say, staring past her.
“If you stole big, you’d be gone already. Real rich don’t make it to intake.”
I curl my hands into fists and hold my breath.
“Move,” she snaps. “The bench is Kim’s. You take the floor.”
“There’s nowhere—”
“No privileges, princess. Floor.”
There’s no confrontation. I move to the corner and sink against the wall, folding in on myself, careful not to touch anything damp. I swallow the urge to cry, bargain, and scream, all at once.
When the lights don’t go out, because in places like this they never really do, I lie on the freezing floor, staring at the stained ceiling. Every sound keeps me alert. Footsteps. Coughs. A muffled cry from a woman nearby.
I think about everything waiting for me. And when I realize I have nothing left... I feel the reality of what I did crushing my chest to the point of panic.
I close my eyes. But there’s no running from the consequence. Not even in my dreams.
The room is small, airless. It looks nothing like the grand, wood-paneled courtrooms I grew up seeing on television.
The chair beside mine is occupied by Mr. Miller, the public defender, a young man in an ill-fitting suit, dark circles etched deep beneath his eyes, clutching a stack of folders.
The judge reads my name the way someone opens a spam email. With zero interest, and ready to delete it.
