The Moonstruck

“Kitten, what…what time is it?”

My eyes instinctually jumped to my left wrist. Naked and pale. Of course, no watch. “You’re asking the wrong girl.”

“Well,” I heard him smack his lips and could just see their wet red hue, “Could you introduce me to the right girl because I want dinner.”

Laughing, I shook my head, repositioning myself against the wall. “We’ve been in this damn prison for…,” I glanced at the ticks carved into the opposite wall, “half a decade now and you still don’t know the routine? Shame, shame…”

I knew when dinner was: when the red stain of the sun, beating fierce across the floor, met the water basin on the other side of the cell. But it made me happy to tease Jack. It was familiar. And I was happy he was talking again. It’d been a week or so. At least.

It wasn’t that he was mad. Or peevish. It was the guards. They beat him. Horribly. Some nights, when slumber escaped me, I could hear them. Hear their fists hit his flesh, hear his blood hit the floor. Hear him laughing. And then for days, he would sleep. And whine like a dog to me through the chink in the wall, his mouth too sore and too broken to make words.

I wasn’t about to spoil the first conversation we’d had in weeks with a few quippy answers. No. I would savor his words and their salt.

He cracked his knuckles, muttering, grunting, cursing. “You are good for absolutely nothing, you know that? Nuh-thing. But…but, while I have you here…” I heard the scratch of his uniform against the gritty floor of the cell. “What are you wearing?”

A smirk began to roll across my lips, slow like summer clouds. “Just something I threw on. A little orange number.”

He let out a low dirty laugh, a snicker filthy enough to throw a bit of pink to the pale of my cheeks. “Is it…tight?”

I could just see him. Laying on his stomach, swinging his legs, and grinning like a pervy little kid reading some smut. I grinned, licking my lips. “In all the right places.”

He groaned and there was the wet sound of him licking his lips. “Well-" He didn’t get to finish. No pun intended. A horrid buzzing noise rang first through my cell and then through his.

I watched the door swing lazy and slow on its rusted hinges. My guards were standing in the doorway, their faces fixed with the usual disinterested scowl as they marched toward me.

“Hello boys,” I murmured, feeling their fingers dig into my arms as they roughly hoisted me to my feet. I didn’t resist as they forced me from my cell but from the raucous now filling the hallway of High Security, I’d reckon that was not the case with my partner.

“WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT? NO, DON’T TOUCH ME. DON’T TOUCH ME THERE. I SAID UNHAND ME FIENDS!”

The fleshy sound of a punch. A rough cough. Laughter and then the sound of feet dragging along the floor. The Joker was quickly and brusquely lugged out of his cell, his guards grimacing at having to touch him.

We began down the hallway. My escorts had relinquished their grip on my arms; it wasn’t that they trusted me. They simply knew by now that I wouldn’t tolerate being handled. The Joker on the other hand was kept on a very short leash.

“Psst,” he hissed and I felt the spray of his spit on the back of my neck. He was a few strides behind me. “Bijou…where are we going?”

I sneered over my shoulder at him, wiping the spittle from my skin, “We’re going to dinner, you dog.” My glare softened slightly though, when I noticed his bloody lip.

His eyes got very wide and he smiled like a child. He turned to the beefy guard on his left. “Is it pizza night?”

The man gave his shoulder a harsh shove. “Eyes forward.”

The Joker sighed, cracking his neck. “Why are you so mean to me, Darrell? Hmm? Is it cause I’m black?”

I winced, waiting for the blow coming his way. But Darrell, one of the few African American men on security, seemed to be keeping it in. He must’ve been practicing some of those anger management techniques the Joker had suggested last week through his mouthful of bloody gums.

We passed the next few minutes in awkward silence, with me at the head of the pack, my partner tripping and shuffling and humming behind me. Another couple of heavy doors and dreary hallways later, we arrived at the “special” cafeteria.

Special in that it was not a cafeteria at all. It was a small, ugly room lit with a single green fluorescent lamp that hung from the ceiling. This was where we shared our meals.

During our first couple years of incarceration, we ate our meals in our cells. Only I was allowed an hour or so of free time in the courtyard, a gray span of concrete paved in the middle of the facility; I was decidedly less dangerous than my partner. At least my psychiatrist thought so.

Back then the only correspondence between the Joker and I consisted of our muttering through the cracks in the wall separating our cells. I hadn’t seen him in months, other than the occasional passing glance when either of us was being whisked away for therapy. I had started to forget the little things. The way his lip curled with petty disgust. The reptilian flick of his tongue. That blank lunatic stare. And I had begun to wilt.

The Joker hadn’t reacted well to the separation either. He’d taken to having “tantrums”. Refusing his meals. Hiding his medication under his tongue, only to flush it away later. He was peevish, childish, unpredictably violent. I’d spent a good many nights listening to him scream and jabber, like a junkie going through withdrawal.

The irony was sweet. He was locked up in a nuthouse and he was just getting crazier.

But then, just after he’d brutalized his fourth guard (there was an incident with a couple of fingers), a compromise was reached. It seemed the doctors had finally figured out the cause of all this bad behavior. So they fixed the problem and gave us our little room. We were allowed our private time twice a week.

The space had once been used as a sedation room for unruly patients. The walls were still padded and I could just make out a few bloody scratch marks along the lagging, yellow with age.

My partner and I took our seats on either side of a plastic picnic table, which stood on four wonky legs in the middle of the room. We were silent, waiting for our food, staring at each other.

Our dinner arrived shortly: two dirty porcelain plates and, on each, a greasy slice of pizza, a meager bit of lettuce, and a swampy peach mixture. A carton of milk for me and a regular coke for him. The guards gave their usual warning and then eventually left to stand outside the door. We were alone.

“How have you been?” My voice was clear and eerily maternal in the quiet.

The Joker rubbed his palms together, licking his lips for emphasis. He picked up his plastic silverware and started to cut his salad into even smaller shreds before answering.

“Eh...spectacular. Doc started me on these new meds. Wants to, uh…pick my mind for memories, early causes of my antisocial personality via dreams.”

I sipped my milk through the bendy straw. “And the pills?”

“Oh divine!” he exclaimed, folding his pizza down the middle and taking it to his mouth. “They give me real trippy acid dreams. Or at least…” he paused, the rotten red sauce on his lips giving the illusion of blood, “I think it’s the pills. It could just be me. Au naturel.”

I chuckled, smiling sullenly as I picked at my pizza. I hated the food here and it showed; I was skin and bones. But healthy bones, thanks to all the milk.

A horrible pang shot through me, echoing brassy and sharp in my chest. This always happened when I thought of Maude. It was the little things that called her to mind. Like a carton of milk. I pushed it away, the taste turning sour on my tongue.

“I see little Maudie’s found her way into your head again,” the Joker muttered, not looking at me and cracking open his cola.

I gave him a look. “For once, could you not read my mind? It’s terribly frustrating.”

He raised his hands in defense, sticky with plastic cheese. “I’m just saying, there’s no need to torture yourself. Her next visit should be right around the corner.” He stared at me and then at my plate, eyeing my pizza. I shook my head, picking up the slimy sliver and tossing it onto his plate. It landed with a sick splat and he tucked in.

Admittedly, he had a point. Maude would be stopping in soon. She’d made a habit of visiting at least twice a month, whether occasion called for it or not.

It still came as a shock. She was all grown up at twenty-two. Still so beautiful. She had color in her face now. And flesh on her bones. More than me anyway. I never doubted she’d survive, but it was a pleasant surprise to see just how well she was doing. Still I couldn’t help but notice that she was somehow different.

It was in her manner of speaking, her odd fidgeting. How sometimes she would speak too fast about strange things and laugh at nothing at all and breathe in whining gasps. It was like talking to the Joker, when he got…fanatical. And then sometimes she wouldn’t talk much at all, except to mutter little sorry responses to my questions. There had been talk of a boyfriend. I wondered if he was the cause of all this discrepancy.

Her visits made me happy but certainly didn’t quench my yearning for the old life. The thought spun me into the present moment.

“Jack?” I murmured after a few minutes.

He fixed his eyes to my face and began gnawing at the crust of my slice of pizza.

“When are we…you know?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Spit it out, kitten. They can’t hear you.”

“But they can read lips,” I returned, eyeing the little black camera perched in the right corner of the ceiling. Its red light gave a funny little twinkle.

The Joker sniffed and let out a low belch, before quickly tossing back the rest of his soda. He slammed the can down onto the table. “What do you wanna know?”

I sighed, pushing a lump of peach around the rim of the plate with a claw-like fingernail. “Time, date, a plan…”

“I got…,” he began and grinned toothily, “One of those three things.”

I brightened suddenly. “Really?”

He sucked his teeth. “It’s little.” He held up two fingers to show just how much of a notion. “Don’t get too excited now, kitten. Just give me a little time to, uh…extrapolate.” Clearing his throat, he ran his finger along the dirty plain of his plate to get the last of the red sauce. I watched him suck his finger clean. Tease.

I rolled my eyes, attempting to shrug off what animation his words had rallied. “Sure. Just illuminate me when you bloody well feel like it.”

He set his elbow on the table, placing his chin in his palm. He smiled, obviously amused, and I could see for an instance in the vast blackness of his eyes that he had more than a notion. He had a whole fucking fleshy plan. But like I said – tease.

“Eat your peaches, kitten. You’ll need your strength. Trust me.”