"It's still there," I said, putting my hand on her cheek. I knew it would feel cool on her hot skin. My mother used to do this when I was sick, I suddenly remembered, and for a moment I could feel it distinctly, the touch of her cool hands.

Yvonne lifted her head to see the horse still prancing in the moonlight, then lay back on the pillow. "I wish this was over."

I knew what Rena would say. The sooner the better. A few months ago, I'd have gone her one further. I would have thought, what was the difference? When she gave birth to the baby, once it had been given away, there would always be something more to lose, a boyfriend, a home, a job, sickness, more babies, days and nights rolling over each other in an ocean that was always the same. Why hurry disaster?

But now I had seen her sitting cross-legged on her bed whispering to her belly, telling it how great the world was going to be, that there were horses and birthdays, white cats and ice cream. Even if Yvonne wouldn't be there for roller skates and the first day of school, it had to count for something. She had it now, that sweetness, that dream. "Yeah, when it's time, you'll think it's too soon," I said.

Yvonne held my hand to her hot forehead. "You're always cool. You don't sweat at all. Oh, the baby's moving," she whispered. "You want to feel it?"

She shoved up her T-shirt and I put my hand on her bare belly, round and hot as rising dough, to feel the odd distortions of the baby's movements against my palm. Her smile was lopsided, divided, delight warring with what she knew was coming.

"I think it's a girl," she whispered. "The other one was a girl."

She talked about her babies only late at night when we were alone. Rena wouldn't let her talk about them, she told her not to think about them. But Yvonne needed to talk. The father of this one, Ezequiel, drove a pickup truck. They had met at Griffith Park, and she fell in love when he put her on the merry-go-round.

I tried to think of something to say. "She's got a good kick. Maybe she'll be a ballerina, ese."

The simple melody line of the electric guitar bounced off the hills and fed in through the window, and the mound of Yvonne's stomach danced in time, the tiny bumps of hands and feet.

"I want her to do Girl Scouts. You're gonna do Girl Scouts, mija," she said to the mound. She looked back up at me. "Did you ever do it?"

I shook my head.

"I always wanted to," she said, tracing figure eights on the damp sheet. "But I couldn't ask. My mom would've laughed her head off. 'Your big ass in the damn Girl Scouts?'"

We sat there for the longest time, not saying anything. Hoping her daughter would have all the good things. The guitarist had quieted down, he was playing "Michelle." My mother loved that song. She could sing it in French.

Yvonne dozed off, and I went back to bed, thinking of my mother's cool hands on my face in the heat of a fever, the way she would wrap me in sheets soaked in ice water, eucalyptus, and cloves. I am your home, she'd once said, and it was still true.

I crawled under the bed, pulled out the sack of her letters, some packets thin as a promise, others fat like white koi. The bag was heavy, it exhaled the scent of her violets. I got up silently, not to wake Yvonne, and slipped out of the room, shutting the door tightly behind me.

In the living room, on the green couch, I turned on the beaded lamp that made everything look like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. I lifted handfuls of letters onto the coffee table. I hated my mother but I craved her. I wanted to understand how she could fill my world with such beauty, and could also say, that woman was born to OD.

The battered tomcat stalked along the back of the couch, cautiously climbed onto me. I let it curl up under my heart, heavy and warm and purring like a truck in low gear.

Dear Astrid,

It's three in the morning, we've just had fourth count. In Ad Seg, the lights burn all night, fluorescent and stark on gray block walls just wide enough for the bed and the toilet. Still no letter from you. Only Sister Lunaria 's sexual litany. It runs day and night from the bottom bunk, like shifts of Tibetan monks praying the world into being. This evening, the exegesis has centered upon the Book of Raul, her last boyfriend. How worshipfully she describes the size and configuration of his member, the prismatic catalog of his erotic response.

Sex is the last thing I think about here. Freedom is my only concern. I ponder the configuration of molecules in the walls. I meditate upon the nature of matter, a prevalence of void within the whirling electron rodeo. I try to vibrate between the packets of quanta, phasing at precisely the opposite wavelength, so that eventually I will exist in between the pulses, and matter will become wholly permeable. Someday, I will walk right through these walls. is giving it to Vicki Manolo over on Simmons A," quoth Lunaria. "He's hung like a horse. When he sits down it's like he's got a baseball bat in there. "

The inmates like Goniales. He takes the trouble to flirt, wears cologne, his hands are clean as white calla. She is masturbating, imagining enormous penises, she's coupling with horses, with bulls, she's positively Jovian in her fantasies, while I stare up at the pinpricks in the acoustical tiles and listen to the nightbreath of the prison.

These days, I hear everything. I hear the click of the cards in guard tower f, not poker, sounds like gin rummy, listen to their sad admissions of hemorrhoids and domestic suspicions. The old ladies in the honor cottage, Miller, snore with their dentures in a glass. I hear the rats in Culinary. A woman screams in the SCU, she hears the rats too, but doesn't understand they're not in her bed. Restraints are quickly applied.

In the dormitories of Reception, I hear murmured threats as they shake down a new girl. She's soft, a check kiter, she wasn 't prepared to be here. They take everything she has left to take. "Pussy," they say after they're through.

The rest of the prison sleeps fitfully, rocked in dreams made vivid by captivity. I know what they're dreaming. I read them like novels, it's better than Joyce. They're dreaming of men who beat them, a backhand, unsubtle kick to the groin. Men who clench their teeth before striking, they hiss, "Look what you 're making me do. " The women cringe even in sleep, under the stares of men's eyeballs roadmapped with veins, popped with rage, the whites the color of mayonnaise left out for a week. One wonders how they could even see to deliver their blows. But women 's fear is a magnet. I hope you don 't know this. It draws the fist, the hands of men, hard as God's.

Others are luckier. They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.