Then she is gone, all the mothers are gone, and the rest of the day stretches before us. In the courtyard, I see a fight among three women—teeth bared, hair coming unclipped. They scream about a missing milk sweet. For the rest of the day, we fall and die from knowing, but never being able to say, especially to our mothers, that the inside of the prison is an unreachable place. So what if there is a courtyard, and a garden, and a TV room? The guards tell us over and over that we live well, we live better than the trapped souls in the men’s prison. Still we feel we are living at the bottom of a
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