The Ragdoll

Prison

Dedicated to Caitlyn Pendergest ~

Emily Thomas did not go without a fight. She kicked, she punched, she stabbed, she bit, but she was no match for Heart City's finest. She was on the ground in handcuffs with no way out in less than a minute.

They forcefully threw her in the back of a heavily armoured S.W.A.T van, but not without a glance of an officer holding the hand of Sarah, walking her to a police car on its way to god-knows-where.

While in prison, Emily suffered a withdrawal from murder worse than anything she had ever experienced. It sent her into the most painful kind of panic attacks when she was asleep, dreaming of the feeling she got when blood splattered her clothes and her face. She woke up in a cold sweat, shaking with tears running down her cheeks. She slept on the top bunk in her small prison cell. The bunk made her feel like she was sleeping on concrete every night. It was worse than her futon, which was basically just metal bars covered in a thin layer of fabric.

The withdrawal also caused her to pick at her stitches, which were infected beyond comprehension two weeks into her stay at Heart City Female Penitentiary. She would wake up surrounded by tiny pieces of skin and dried blood, which was also the stuff that was lodged behind her fingernails.

Emily was silent for two weeks after she had been arrested, she didn't want to believe that she had actually been caught. She didn't want to believe that everything she knew and loved had been torn away from her. So she didn't speak. She thought. She thought about her father. She thought about how sweet it would've been to make the man that caused it all suffer. She thought about Nick, she thought about Sarah, she even thought about Sandy Vance. She spent most of the time in her cell, except when she decided to have the occasional meal with the rest of the prisoners. Emily's cell was the last in a long hallway of cells. She was in the very back because she was considered one of the more deadly prisoners, even though she was by far the skinniest and palest. So she would spend her days with her fists closed tightly around the metal bars, staring at the white concrete wall in front of her, and thinking about everything she did wrong to get where she was. Some days, she wouldn't even take a break from her contemplation to sleep. She would stand there in her light blue jumpsuit, with her dirty black hair in her face, and she would think.

But Emily wasn't alone in her cell. She shared it was a woman much taller and rounder than her. She lived with a black woman named Patty Lewis. Patty was a gentle woman, who got out of prison early the year before for good behavior, but was sent right back for reasons she never liked to talk about. As soon as Patty found out that she was getting a new cell mate, she was all kinds of happy. Patty didn't mind prison, but the one thing that bothered her was how lonely she got. How she would stare up at the bottom of the top bunk at night, wishing she had a friend sleeping above her. A friend that would always take her side when a fight broke out in the courtyard. A friend who would protect her from all of the evil people who taunted her and who she knew wanted to hurt her. Patty hadn't been violent her entire life, and she wasn't going to start just because she got thrown in a place where most people were.

The day that her new cellmate was arriving, Patty was excited, more excited than she had been in years. She scrubbed the toilet, made the bed, cleaned the gunk off the floor next to the sink that she had been meaning to clean for weeks.

And then she arrived. Emily Thomas, the woman who had been arrested under the charge of patricide and homicide. But Patty didn't make judgements based on someone's past. After all, she herself had been accused and punished for plenty of things that she hadn't done in her lifetime.

And then Emily was brought in. Patty had been sitting on her bed, waiting for her possible new friend. And then the cell door opened, and a guard brought her in by the arm and removed her handcuffs.