"If someone fucks with you, fuck them up them real bad. Even if you have to take a bit of pain yourself, if it takes them down, do it."
Not exactly the motherly advice you'd find in "Homemaker Monthly", but advice I've remembered for almost twenty years, told to me on my first day of elementary school. It helped me through the tribulations of my schooldays for sure. However, like my mother, it didn't stop me from marrying the waste of sperm I loved for a while, my husband, Lewis.
Married at twenty, and almost broke by twenty-one, I thought things couldn't get much worse. I was wrong. By the age of twenty-two I was visiting my husband in Prison. Looking back, I guess his love of fast cars and reckless heavy drinking were always doomed for a head-on collision - as was he, with a packed schoolbus. Eight years in Prison were to follow, more had it not been for the miracle of no fatal or even serious injuries.
Six months down the line from the trial, and my life had become a drudgery of making ends meet, interspersed with fortnightly visits to the Forddale Maximum Security Penitentary.
Lewis had never been a strong man, and it didn't take long for prison to wear him down. Each time I met him he seemed to have slipped further into listlessness and despair. The old arrogance and cocky smile, the things that had first attracted me to him, were vanishing quickly. The man who sat behind the reinforced glass and glared back at me was becoming as sorrowful and bland as the grey walls that surrounded him.
I tried hard to rouse him from his apathy, but he was becoming less and less communicative. It was almost a year into his sentence when I got a clue about what was wrong.
It was around March. I was sitting behind the glass, watching the prisoners file out into the visitors room, waiting for Lewis. I saw him emerge, but before he reached me another man sat opposite me, and picked up the phone. He was dark-skinned and stocky, with short black fuzzy hair. It came as a shock to see him opposite me, a smug grin sweeping across his face as he looked me up and down shamelessly.
"You a nice piece of ass, bitch,"
His words shocked me, I'd forgotten I'd already picked up the receiver, anticipating Lewis. I felt my face flush, shocked by his words and tone. He was casual, laid-back, but from his eyes I could tell he meant what he said.
"Why don't you come back here, let me play with that tight white pussy of yours, I'll..." He was suddenly grabbed by one of the guards, and yanked away before he could continue. I sat stunned, watching him grin at me as he was dragged away. As Lewis slunk into the vacant chair I realized he had been standing nearby listening to this without saying a word, or lifting a finger.
"How could you let that man talk to me like that?" I blazed.
"I'm sorry. I couldn't do anything," Lewis stammered, "He'd go crazy if I did. I have to know my place."
"Know your place? You let that man make those suggestions and you did nothing," I hissed.
I was furious with the stranger of course, but keen to take out my frustrations on my pathetic husband. I had wanted to shout many times before. Lewis loved to wallow in self-pity, and whilst I was of course sympathetic to his suffering, it always struck me how he'd never ask about my problems, or even inquire much as to how I was. The past year had been a major struggle, and everything I'd achieved had been entirely despite Lewis, I certainly never got any support.
"You're so pathetic Lewis." I continued, "Don't be so weak. Be a man for once in your life, please."
I continued for alot longer, listening to his grovelling apologies only made it worse. After calming down I apologized to him myself. I still loved him, after all, and I felt so guilty attacking him that way, and leaving him to his prison cell.
