Prison Stories
The charcoaled walls and the stench of sweaty bodies from the other cells sent their greetings to me in my cell where I sat with my hands crossed on my knees, my chin balancing the weight of my head on it. I was staring at her– she had been my ever so shy and quiet roommate for three months now, “and counting” I thought to myself. I sighed heavily.
She had not spoken a word once since we started living together. We have had baths, eaten, slept, answered nature’s calls, and dressed in the same room for three months but I still didn’t know her name.
At first, I thought her rude, maybe a snub, but then I later figured that if she was simply plain rude, she would have at least spoken up–even if once– to ask me to do something for her, but Nony ( I had decided to name her Nony, as in Anonymous, since I didn’t know what to call her when I was gossiping about her with the friends I made in the prison that is my mind), she never spoke up, even when she needed help. It baffled me. I was still staring when suddenly, the most unexpected thing happened. Nony spoke.
“Hey, there… sorry I didn’t speak up all these while. I’m simply still in shock from why and how I ended up here. Pleased to meet you, my name is Moni.” She stretched out her blackened palm that hinted complexion that was several shades lighter beneath the soot covering it. I took her palm, shook it, and introduced myself to her. “The pleasure is all mine. My name is Loni. Loni Babs.” And that was how our endless night started.
“So… your story still shocks you too? Interesting. I guess I’m not the only one. If you don’t mind, could you tell me about it? I’ll tell you about mine too of course.” I saw the hesitation in her eyes and body language when I told her but I was desperate for a real conversation with an actual human so I ignored them and pressed on.
“Please? Pretty please?” I tried to muster all the innocence my hardened face could bring out after spending three months in a dump that even pigs would reject. I knew that it would be difficult for a ‘hardened criminal’ like me to come up with such but I tried anyway. I turned out to be in luck.
“Okay, alright. I’ll tell you. I don’t know why, but for some strange reason, I feel like I can share my story with you because you’d understand. So… here it goes.” She adjusted her bum on the floor and used her shoe to kill a roach that was threatening to attack us while we both screamed for help, receiving insults from the other inmates for disturbing their sleep.
After much screaming and killing, we finally settled down and suddenly broke into bouts of laughter. We mocked and mimicked each other’s reactions to the beast that had just threatened to kill us till we didn’t have the strength to go on due to the grumbling of our empty stomachs. Still laughing, she started her prison story.
“Well, my story sure is funny. I might not look like it and it might sound ridiculously unbelievable but I’m a V.” She paused to allow her words to sink into my consciousness but it didn’t take long. There was no need for it to because I shared a similar testimony.
I cleared my throat before replying to her. “It doesn’t. Believe me, it really doesn’t because I’m also a V.” Her reaction sent me doubling over in laughter. Her eyes shot out in shock, they looked like they were about to fall off their sockets.
“You mean to tell me that you are part of the one percent of adult females that have not had sex?” She looked genuinely surprised. I laughed and asked her to give us more credit by increasing the percentage to at least fifteen before affirming her question.
After many back-and-forth doubt and affirmations, we were able to move past the fact that I was a twenty-five-year-old virgin. I was like a goddess, an alien, a divine being to her. She could understand her being a twenty-year old-virgin, but meeting a twenty-five-year-old virgin? She couldn’t believe that.
“Okay, back to my story then. As I said, I am a twenty-year-old V. It’s by choice by the way. I’m not doing it because of some religious or moral shit. I really don’t give a damn about a book that is supposed to tell me how I’m supposed to live my life. I choose the way I want to live, I choose my life.”
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Again, she paused to allow her words to sink but I simply sat straight-faced. I was no religious bigot but I sure wasn’t happy about someone talking about my Christianity that way. I had never been one to judge or condemn though, so I simply watched on.
After waiting for sixty full seconds and getting no reply from me, she continued her tale.
“Okay, so my reason for not having sex is simple. It’s a ‘test of wills’ for me. I want to see how much my will can keep me from doing something. I want to see how much I can achieve by using my will power, I want to test the strength of my ‘No’ and the strength of my ‘Yes’.”
I looked at her hard. It wasn’t the first time someone would be giving that as their reason for wanting to stay a virgin, though I had always felt like it was unrealistic and baseless. Ninety percent of the girls I knew that moved with that ideology always ended up having sex within the following three years.
I looked at her feeling all mighty and powerful for saying something ‘intelligent’ and shook my head inwardly. She knew nothing about life yet. I would soon learn though, that it was never right to jump to conclusions as her story would teach me in the next hour of my breathing.
“Okay… so I guess that’s enough about my reason for choosing Virginhood. Back to my story now. It’s pretty sad actually.” She sighed and I saw a pain in her eyes that she had been masking behind all the mirth and laughter from the roach incident moments earlier. At that point, she looked more like the Nony I had been living with in the past three months than Moni the familiar stranger that I had started knowing in the past three hours. I shifted on my mud-stained seat and wiped the caked dirt off my thighs so I could give her my full attention.
“I’ll be straight with you ‘cos I don’t like to search for things I didn’t lose in the bush…” I knotted my brows in confusion, she saw my reaction and understood that I didn’t get what she was trying to say so she opted to explain in simpler terms. “You know… I don’t like to beat about the bush?”
Reckon flooded my face and I wasn’t going to be shameless about my ignorance or inability to get the joke. “Oh… I get now. I see, I see. That was kinda dry though.”
She laughed and affirmed my statement, causing us to double over in fresh bouts of laughter. I still couldn’t believe shy, quiet Nony had this much vibe all these while and she had been hiding it. I wondered why and how she could have been quiet for so long. Even more, I wanted to know why she decided to speak up tonight of all nights, after being quiet for so long.
“So… Moni. You’ve been quiet for so long, why today? Why tonight?” She looked a bit confused so I opted to ease her wrinkled forehead. “You know… why speak up today? Why did you decide to come out of your shell tonight? I mean, you’ve been quiet for so long.”
She stared hard into the ceiling, her gaze could have put a hole through the blocks. After about five long minutes of deciding whether she should talk or not, she spoke and she spoke very slowly.
“I was raped. Gang-raped.” She looked at me, her eyes threatening to unleash the floodgates that were keeping her tears at bay.
Instinctively, I scooted towards her and hugged her right there on the dirty floor. I didn’t say anything, didn’t feel the need to. At that point I knew she didn’t want to hear a lecture or cliché words of comfort, I knew all she needed was a very warm and honest hug. I knew because that was what I wanted myself but it wasn’t about me right now. I had to focus on the twenty-year-old kid that had just opened up to me that she got gang-raped as a virgin.
“Umm, I don’t mean to be rude or insensitive but why do you still call yourself a virgin if you’ve already, you know…” I was at a loss as to the proper words I could use in the situation we were in without sounding insensitive.
“It’s fine, I get what you are trying to say. The truth is, I like to tell myself that I’m still an innocent twenty-year-old virgin even though I was raped by ten guys. I do not like to count that horrific experience as having sex. I would rather think of it as getting beaten or mutilated, you know, like when they use blades to maim your entire body. Though to be honest, that was how my genitals felt that day– they felt maimed.”
I looked at her and shook my head in disgust. At the very least I was only raped by my boyfriend and I still knew how much it affected me, I could only imagine how difficult it must have been for her.
She was watching me intently, probably trying to decipher my thoughts and opinion about the entire matter. I had nothing to say so I decided to stay quiet, she cleared her throat and decided to break the yoke of silence.
“So what about you? What’s your story? How did you end up here?” I was about to answer when I realized that her story was still incomplete. Yes, she had told me she was raped, but that didn’t explain why she was in jail. I asked her again and she told me the full story this time around.
Apparently, her uncle had been trying to get her to sleep with him and she had been refusing. Not only was it incest, but she was also a virgin. Her uncle deflowering her felt like an even greater sin so she refused vehemently. He had then arranged the boys to gang-rape her while he sat down to watch from one of the corners of the room. She of course tried to defend herself and in the squabble, got one of them killed.
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Her uncle took it up and that was why she was in jail. Since he was her only living guardian, she had no one to fight for her. Her story was pathetic, to say the least. No wonder she had been quiet for so long, hell, I doubt I would ever be able to talk again if I was in her shoes. I reached forward to hug her again, tighter this time, and cleared my throat to tell her my story.
“Well, just like you, I got raped. My boyfriend of seven years raped me.” She looked genuinely shocked and I wondered why, when she had gone through worse herself.
“Seven years? But… but… it doesn’t make any sense.” I shook my head in agreement. It didn’t make sense to me either but it was the situation I found myself in.
“We were making out one night like we have been doing in the past seven years of our lives when he suddenly wanted to ‘go in.’ He knew about my objection to premarital sex and had never complained about it. In fact, it was why I had stayed with him for that long– the fact that he didn’t pressure me for sex.
Anyway, he suddenly wanted us to have sex that night but I refused him. He continued to ask, saying he wanted to go fourth base with me. I reminded him of how satisfied we had been all those years in our third base but he refused, he continued to beg me until he stopped. He simply went in. No permission, no restraint. In one dive, it all went flying– my red-blooded dignity and innocence. I lost the will to fight so I just stayed there till he was done.
It was after everything had happened that reality dawned on me, I began to boil. I strolled to the living room that morning and saw him watching the news, legs crossed. He seemed proud of himself, the king of the jungle had just claimed his prey. I snuck to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and stabbed his neck.
His older brother walked in on us, I forgot we had invited him days before to come over that morning. He had his spare keys because they were very close as they were the only children of their parents. He was the one that got me arrested and he used his connections to lock me up here indefinitely, no trial, no hearing.
My family has been trying to get me out or at least appeal to them to release me but his brother refused. Left to my boyfriend, I would be out of here but then it’s not like I care anymore. I have accepted my fate and I do not regret my actions. To be betrayed by someone I loved and trusted for so long… I don’t think I can ever get past that.”
It was her turn to hug me. Both of us had been betrayed by people we had trusted and hoped in. We were locked up indefinitely, with neither of us even bothered about whether we would get out or not. In a way, being here in the prison wasn’t so bad. At least, we got to be free from liars, deceivers, and wicked people that lived among us. We at least got to stay with people that shared our story, shared our pain, that honestly knew us, and felt our injustice.
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I looked around and mentally counted the remaining cells on my floor, multiplying it by the remaining two floors that comprised the building, I had a rough estimate of the number of women who also had prison stories to tell and inwardly wondered if I would one day be privileged to hear theirs too.
Moni was still hugging me and crying softly, so I patted her head and gently cooed behind her left ear, “there there… we’ll be fine honey.”
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