Walking the Dog by Elizabeth Swados Page A

satanic prayers.
    Â Â  1.    My stalker
    Â Â  2.    My intimate friend
    Â Â  3.    My boss
    Â Â  4.    My third world slave
    Â Â  5.    The mocking sneer
    Â Â  6.    The welcoming grin
    Â Â  7.    Arms out, palms reach
    Â Â  8.    A slap across the jaw
    Â Â  9.    The starter gun
    10.    The old pillow
    11.    The possibility
    12.    The impossibilities
    13.    Memories in sepia
    14.    Plans in blue and white
    15.    The threat
    16.    The salvation
    17.    The humiliation
    18.    The redemption from
    19.    Imaginary torture
    20.    The silent rape
    21.    The electric guitar solo
    22.    The starter pistol
    23.    The too-tall wall
    24.    The stairs upward
    25.    My enemy, my enemy
    26.    My enemy, my enemy
    27.    My angel
    28.    The blank page as the brushes fall from swollen hands
    As a newbie, I was assigned to the bathrooms and garbage disposals. I lifted heavy loads by day and painted in a secret space Fits set up for me at night. I heard weeping and cries of pain coming from all directions, as if I was in a sports stadium after a coup.
    At 6:00 a.m. breakfast I saw the other newbies beat to shit, with swollen lips, black eyes, and slashes on their limbs. They could barely sit down. I didn’t have any of that, but my fingers bent in weird directions and the lack of circulation turned them purple and blue.

HALFWAY HOUSE
    Upon my release, I lived in a halfway house off First Street. It was near the projects and the river. The architecture was like a 1960s ghetto elementary school transformed into an apartment building. The floors were chipped wood and old tile. There was a common dining room that gave off that grimy atmosphere of a school cafeteria that wasn’t funded anymore. I had a roommate, Seña Ramos, whom I could tolerate. The room wasn’t huge, but we didn’t crash into each other. I liked that the ceiling was high and we actually had a regular rectangular window. I could see identical, ugly brown housing projects and hints of the FDR. I knew the river, and it ached me with its brown emptiness or comforted me when there were freighters. Seña Ramos was Latina and Catholic and into Santeria, that mystical magical shit. And she had erected a tin altar with magazine shots of Jesus glued to cardboard and Virgin Mary plastic statues wearing costume jewelry. She had about twenty “Santos,” like Barbie dolls in biblical outfits. I worried the candles and incense would burn the place down. And I was exhausted because her strange chanting at night triggered nightmares of incidents I didn’t even know were in my brain. But there were advantages, too. Every week Seña scrubbed the whole place with this special soap one of her fellow worshippersgot in Hartford. It was supposed to keep devils away. To me it smelled like plain old Ajax or Clorox—but what the hell, we had the cleanest place in the facility.
    Seña had been there a year longer than me so she got overnight and weekend passes to see her kids and parents. She used to be the head of a lesbian gang in the South Bronx, and they managed to do a lot of damage to other gangs of the same type. I think she shot at a bunch of preteens in her old life and carried heroin around the city for a Latino don. She also managed to have three kids in the midst of that. It’s hard for me to imagine a five-foot Latina with a Tony Orlando haircut, black jeans, spikes, and pierced everything walking around with a baby sticking out of her totally boy-figure six pack. But what do I know? She’d been in and out of jail since she was ten. I knew she’d slashed a few enemies, even lately. She described knives in the way an entitled, knowledgeable gourmet could talk about a special, rare delicacy. She was nice to me though, and