Sleep Toward Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

gives Jackie her chair. They all know there will be enough chairs soon.
    “I’m sorry to have to say this,” says Veronica, her hands open on the table in front of the television, “but Sharleen, dear, this yelling has got to stop.”
    In her mind, Karen has assigned everyone a color. Karen herself is gray, no color. Veronica is black, because she is called the Black Widow on TV. Tiffany is pink, because everything is pink for her: bracelet, earrings, lips. Tiffany was tan before she came to Death Row, but now she is pale. She has bright blue eyes and hair the color of wheat. She looks like a Charlie’s Angel, with her winged-out bangs and long legs.
    “I keep waking up,” says Tiffany breathlessly, “and hearing Sharleen screaming, and I think he’s come back to get me!” She puts her hand to her throat. Today her nails are Peach Zinger. “The man that killed my girls,” she adds, for clarification.
    “Yeah,” says Jackie, “I keep thinking I’m hearing my husband from the grave.” Jackie is red because her hair is red. It snakes out of any rubber band, frizzing upward, like vines. She says, “My fucking hair! It’s alive, I’m telling you. I need conditioner. I just need some fucking conditioner.”
    Jackie hired a man to kill her husband and her two daughters. The man shot them and cut them up while Jackie was working at her beauty parlor, Get Snippy With Me. She says she was crazy then, but nobody believes her. She tells Veronica that she prays every night for another stay of execution.
    “What the fuck do you want me to do?” says Sharleen. There is menace in her voice. For a nineteen-year-old, she is very scary. Karen decides that Sharleen will be purple.
    “There’s no need to swear,” says Veronica.
    Sharleen laughs. “You gotta be kidding me,” she says.
    “Sharleen,” says Tiffany, “some of us are trying to live Christian lives here. Some of us are trying to be good people.” Tiffany looks at Karen, the only one of them who does not attend Bible study. When the chaplain comes in the afternoons and everyone opens their Bibles around the patio, Karen goes into her cell.
    Sharleen stands up from the table in a violent motion. “You think I wanna fucking scream?” she says in a strained voice. She looks at the chute, where the guards watch her steadily. She pinches her eyes closed and gathers her hands into fists. She is shaking. They all watch her, and wait. Even Veronica looks nervous. Sharleen takes a ragged breath, and then her hands unfurl and move down, tightly gripping the edges of the table. The table is bolted to the floor. Could she lift it, Karen wonders, and if she did, what would she do with it? Throw it across the room?
    But Sharleen does not lift anything. Instead, keeping her hands wrapped around the edge, she opens her eyes. “You think you’re safe in here, don’t you?” she says in a low voice, too low for the guards to hear. “You think you’re safe, all locked away from the world.” She leans in, and her eyes narrow. “You think everyone who hates you is outside these walls,” she says. “But you remember one thing. I’m in here with you.”
    Things were not always like this for Karen. Her earliest memory is her happiest one. She hopes that death will bring her back to that night, with the smell of her mother’s breast: a powdery, caramel smell. The warmth of her mother’s hair, ironed on the kitchen table. A car horn honking, a bright moon sky. Her mother whispering a lullaby, soft vowels, papery voice. They are in the rocking chair, on the porch, wooden boards squeaking. And Karen is inside her mother’s arms. Is this a real memory? Is it any less real than the kicks to her stomach, the burns, the pricks shoving inside her? When she lies in her cell at night, when the TV is turned off and there is a lull in the noise, she thinks about the night on the porch. She tries to believe it was real. She counts the minutes until she will die. August