The following short story is a work of SATIRICAL FICTION. It is borne of the disgust, anger, helplessness, and hopelessness I have felt on an ongoing basis for over a year. Please note the following TRIGGER WARNINGS: Child molestation, false imprisonment, jail/prison, child endangerment, transphobia, xenophobia, blasphemy (specific to Christianity)
When Terrence stepped out of the jail, the guard banged the gate shut behind him and locked it. He was back in his clothes, the ones they’d taken off of him when he’d gone into the jail because they said he had to wear jail clothes while he was there. But he didn’t have any other “belongings” as the guards called them. Right before they’d taken him outside, one of the guards had told him that his parents would be there to pick him up, but he didn’t see either of their cars. He glanced uncertainly over his shoulder, wondering if he should ask for help, but the gate guard was back in his little house, watching his little screens.
With no other choice, Terrence sat down on the curb and waited.
Maybe his parents had forgotten about him. He’d been gone forever, so maybe they forgot.
Maybe they didn’t want him anymore now that he’d gone to jail.
He wished he had Sergeant Teddy with him, but the guards had laughed when he’d asked them if Sergeant Teddy could come to the jail, too. They made fun of him for wanting his dolly even though he explained Sergeant Teddy was a bear in an army uniform, not a doll.
Terrence hoped his parents still wanted him.
What if he had to go potty? He knew how to pee in the bushes like when Daddy took him camping, but maybe the guard would see and get angry and put him back in jail.
He continued to sit on the curb and worry as the time went on and the sun burned his scalp and nose. He wasn’t so good at telling time, but it felt like a million hours had passed since the gate had banged shut behind him.
Then he heard the car coming and he looked up with new hope. His mom’s sunny smile shined out at him from the driver’s seat as she parked in front of him. She didn’t bother to turn off the engine before rushing out of the car, dropping to her knees, and pulling him into a tight hug. Terrence closed his eyes and smelled her familiar scent and felt good because she still wanted him.
“I’m so sorry, champ! Our lawyer had the darndest time figuring out which jail you were in. No one seemed to know.” She pulled back, held his shoulders. “Are you okay? Did they treat you alright?”
Terrence shrugged. “I drew pictures.”
“You did? That’s lovely. Where are they?”
“They said I couldn’t keep them.”
“Oh, well… never mind. You can draw new pictures at home.”
She stood and pulled him to his feet with her. Holding his hand, she walked him around to the back seat of the car, helped him into the car seat, buckled him in. Then she got in, put the car in reverse, and swiveled around to begin backing out of the parking space.
“Where’s Daddy?”
She glanced at him briefly, her expression sorrowful. “His time off request didn’t get approved. But he knows today is the big day, and he’s excited to see you after he gets home from work, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I have a surprise for you, too. A present. It just arrived in the mail today. Isn’t that neat?”
“Neat,” Terrence repeated.
Terrence’s eyes followed the broken white lines on the street while his mom drove. They were pretty much the same as the lines around all the houses, but the ones around the houses were yellow and didn’t have spaces in between like a tracing picture. A lot of people had fences behind their yellow lines, but his house didn’t have a fence in the front, only in the back. His next-door neighbors on one side had fences all around their house, and the ones on the other side where Julia lived didn’t have any fences at all.
Julia went to the same school as him. They were in the same grade, except she was in one of the girl classrooms. But they saw each other at recess and lunch. Sometimes they talked, but they couldn’t stand too close to each other or the teachers got mad. He wondered if she’d gone to jail, too. She was always nice to him. He was pretty sure she didn’t mean to get him in trouble.
“Home at last!” his mom sang out. “Come inside. Are you hungry? Do you want a snack?”
“Graham crackers? Is that okay?”
The guards had laughed at him the first morning, during breakfast, when he was scared and confused, and he had asked for graham crackers. These weren’t the guards who had laughed at him for asking for Sergeant Teddy. These were different guards. Terrence thought the guards must like to laugh because they did it so much. He’d quickly learned that the jail only had corn flakes for breakfast (with skim milk), and mashed potatoes, green peas, and dino-nuggets for lunch and dinner.
“Yes, of course it’s okay!”
All cheer and smiles, his mom pulled the box out of the pantry. Soon, Terrence was sitting at his kitchen table eating graham crackers and drinking chocolate milk (2%). They tasted like the best thing ever to him. He didn’t know what gold tasted like, but he knew it was shiny and cost a lot of money, so he thought the graham crackers must taste like gold. Or gold tasted like graham crackers.
“Ready for your present?” With a flourish, his mom pulled something from behind her back and held it up for him to see.
Terrence studied the shorts with confusion. They looked just like the ones he already had in his dresser. They were soft and dark green, and they had the word PENIS on the front, with a down arrow below that. Except… this pair of shorts had a white checkmark in a blue circle next to the word PENIS. All his dad’s work pants had the same checkmark next to PENIS. And his mom had a checkmark on all her pants and skirts and stuff, next to the longer word that he couldn’t pronounce very well. He knew it started with V. One time, in school, he had asked Mr. Fletcher how to say it, and he’d gotten a demerit for asking an inappropriate question. So he’d asked his daddy later at home, and his daddy said it was the word for girl parts just like PENIS was the word for boy parts.
“You’re verified!” his mom told him when the silence had gone on too long. “Isn’t that great?”
“What’s verified?”
“It means the government knows you really are a boy, so you don’t have to do any more check-ins at school or church.”
“Oh.” Terrence felt something unclench within him. “No more ever?”
“Nope. No more ever.”
He felt happier than he’d felt when they told him he got to go home from jail. He hated the part of school where Mr. Fletcher pulled him behind the check-in curtain and took his pants down. It made him feel yucky in his tummy. One time, when Mr. Fletcher was touching his PENIS, Terrence said he didn’t like it, and Mr. Fletcher got angry.
“Don’t be ungrateful. This is for your protection. You wouldn’t want one of those Jesusforsaken transgenders in your classroom, would you?”
Terrence didn’t know what a transgender was, but he agreed that having them in the classroom would be bad because he knew that agreeing with Mr. Fletcher always made him less angry. He finished checking Terrence’s PENIS, and Terrence learned to go somewhere else in his head during the checks.
Now he didn’t have to go anywhere else in his head.
No more checks.
He finished his chocolate milk.
Terrence’s daddy got home in time for dinner. He smiled when he saw Terrence and came over to give him a big ol’ handshake. That’s what Daddy called them. Big ol’ handshakes between men.
“There he is! Put ‘er there, pal! Two months flew by, huh?”
Two months was a long time, but Terrence didn’t say so. He went with his dad to the dinner table where his mom was serving up steaming helpings of macaroni and cheese.
“I hear the 4-to-6 jails aren’t so bad,” his dad said. “I went to a 10-and-up for six months when I was nine. Do you know that nine is smaller than ten? Have you learned that in school? Big numbers and little numbers?”
Terrence nodded. He knew when he counted to ten that nine came first, and that was probably what his dad meant.
“My tenth birthday was two days before my release date, so they put me in the 10-and-up jail. Can you believe it?” Daddy shook his head, shoved a bite of cheesy pasta into his mouth. “Well, anyway, that was a long time ago.”
Terrence stopped listening after that because his mom asked his dad how was work, and he never understood how work was. He let them talk. He liked their voices. He had missed their voices when he was in jail.
“Did Julia go to jail?” Terrence asked suddenly.
“Yes, she went to the girls’ jail,” his mom told him. “But only for two weeks. Mrs. Witt fought really hard not to have her go at all, but the recording from the doorbell camera showed how Julia was at fault, too. So Mrs. Witt didn’t get her way that time.”
Terrence glanced at his mother. Her voice had gotten tight and low, the way it did when she was angry but didn’t want to yell. She was probably angry at him. Hadn’t she and Daddy told him over and over, “If the nice men ever want to talk to you, be polite, don’t talk back, and everything will be alright”?
The problem was, Terrence didn’t know who the nice men were. He hadn’t understood what his parents had meant until the men had come to the house to arrest him. Then he’d seen the big white letters on the front of their black vests. He couldn’t read all the big words yet, but he knew how to read “nice.” That was a little word. Only the letters all had periods after them, so they said N.I.C.E.
But they hadn’t been nice men. He’d tried really hard not to talk back and to be polite, but he must not have done it right. That was probably why his mom was angry at him.
He was sorry Julia had to go to jail, too. She hadn’t meant to get him in trouble. She shouldn’t have gotten in trouble either. All she’d done was call out to him when she saw him playing in his front yard.
“Terry! Terry, come look!”
Terrence liked that Julia called him Terry. No one else did. His parents had called him that for a little while, but then they stopped all of a sudden. When he asked why, his mom’s voice had gone tight and low. She told him the government had sent them a letter asking them to stop calling him Terry because Terry was a nickname that could be for a boy or a girl, and they wanted people to call him a name that could only be for a boy.
That night, Terrence had sat in his bed holding Sergeant Teddy and listening to his parents’ angry voices coming through the wall. He didn’t understand most of what they were saying, but he heard his mom call Mrs. Witt a bad word.
“Who do you think reported us, Jeff? Her own daughter calls him Terry, and that’s fine. But she hears us do it, and suddenly we’re getting a cease-and-desist order.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Daddy asked. He sounded tired.
“I don’t know. I swear to Lord Jesus, we should apply for a permit to move. We can pretend you want to be closer to work. Or your parents. That woman isn’t happy unless she’s reporting someone for something. I bet she’d report her own mother to N.I.C.E given half a chance, Jesus take her.”
But Julia must not have gotten a letter from the government because she still called him Terry.
Terrence knew he shouldn’t have gotten so close to Julia’s yard. His parents had warned him never to cross the yellow line between his house and his neighbor’s house. He knew they could only visit other houses, like when they went to see Nana and Pop, if they had the special visitor cards hanging around their necks. And when they got packages, the delivery driver always had a card on a string, too. It was very important to have that card, and to show it to any police officer who asked to see it. He knew that for absolutely sure because his parents always reminded him. So he’d tried to stay on his side of the line. Julia had come close enough to show him the four-leaf clover in her hand, but she made sure to stay on her side of the line, too.
“It means good luck!” Julia announced proudly.
“Cool! Where’d you find it?”
“Right over there.” Julia pointed.
Terrence shifted a little so he could see the clover patch in the opposite corner of her yard.
The scream nearly made him pee his pants. He heard the front door to Julia’s house bang against the wall when it swung open.
“Get the Hell away from my daughter!” Mrs. Witt had stormed over and grabbed Julia, pulling her away from the yellow line and Terrence so fast and hard that Julia dropped the clover.
When Terrence looked down at the grass to see if he could find where it went, he noticed he was standing on the wrong side of the yellow line.
“Border crossing scum!” Mrs. Witt shrieked. Her face was super red. “Did you touch her? Did you assault my daughter? You’re lucky I don’t shoot you where you stand.”
Terrence jumped back onto his side of the line, shaking his head frantically back and forth. He wanted to tell her he didn’t do anything, that he’d crossed the border on accident, that he didn’t salt anyone, but he was too scared to talk. Then his mom came out of their house and ran up to them and asked if Terrence was alright.
“You raised a filthy little criminal!” Mrs. Witt screamed. “He violated our border! I’m calling the police! I will have justice for my little girl!”
“Cheryl, I’m sure it was an accident,” Terrence’s mom said. Her voice was calmer than Mrs. Witt’s. “He’s only six.”
“Age isn’t an excuse. Six is old enough to know better. That’s probably why the boy doesn’t have a solid moral code in the first place.” Mrs. Witt stopped screaming long enough to curl her lip. “You and your excuses, Jesus take them. What is this world coming to when my daughter isn’t safe in her own front yard?”
“She’s perfectly safe,” Terrence’s mom said. “My son didn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Tell your excuses to the police if you want. I got the whole incident recorded on my Ring camera.”
Terrence’s mom had tried to talk to Mrs. Witt more, tried to make her let Terrence off with a warning. Julia even tried to say, “Mama, he didn’t do anything. It was an accident. I told him to come look at my clover. I got a four-leaf clover. I found it. It’s right there in the grass, see? It means good luck, Mama.”
But she just dragged Julia back into their house and slammed the door.
That night, the men in black uniforms that said N.I.C.E. on them had come. They said his parents could get a lawyer if they really wanted to, but his guilt was clear from the Ring camera video, so they were waiving the trial. Terrence did everything they said and didn’t talk back to them, but they still put handcuffs on him and drove him in the dark black car to the jail where a guard did a check-in. He made Terrence take off all his clothes and rubbed his hands everywhere, even over Terrence’s chest, which was something not even Mr. Fletcher did.
Then they made him put on the orange jail clothes that said PENIS on the pants without a checkmark, and then the two guards who had laughed when he asked for Sergeant Teddy took him to his cell. It smelled like pee and throw-up, and Terrence was scared to touch anything. After a really long time, a man who wasn’t a guard came to his cell. The guards unlocked the door for him to let him in, and then locked it again behind him. The man was wearing a black robe, so the writing that said PENIS and the arrow pointing down were in white. There was also a cross for Lord Jesus next to PENIS. He said hello and that he was a priest. He made Terrence sit on the creaky bed that smelled the worst like pee, and the priest sat next to him and told him in a gentle voice that Lord Jesus loved little boys who respected borders. The borders around his house were there to keep him safe, and he was in jail because he’d made his neighbors feel unsafe.
Terrence had nodded and nodded until the priest left. That was what he did every time the priest came because the priest came almost every day and he talked a lot. Terrence just nodded and nodded. He didn’t understand half the words he heard, but the priest smiled when Terrence nodded, so he knew he was doing the right thing.
“Robert Frost wrote a poem once about the best kinds of neighbors. Do you know who Robert Frost is?”
No.
Nod.
“Do you like poetry, Terrence?”
No.
Nod.
“Robert Frost said in his poem that good fences make good neighbors. Do you understand, Terrence?”
Julia and Mrs. Witt are my neighbors, but they don’t have fences. Maybe that’s why Mrs. Witt is a bad neighbor. Maybe she needs fences.
Nod.
“That’s good. That’s very good. Remember to respect the fences, respect the borders, and you’ll be the best possible neighbor, just like in Robert Frost’s poem. Robert Frost was American, you know. Just like you and me. Just like Lord Jesus. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Idunno.
Nod.
“Jesus loves you, Terrence. He protects you with His will and his might. He has the power to smite His enemies, so you must not become an enemy of Lord Jesus. Okay?”
“Okay.” Nod. Nod. Nod.
“Good boy. That’s very good.”
That night, his first night back in his own bed that didn’t smell like pee hardly ever, Terrence had nightmares about jail. He woke up and hugged Sergeant Teddy to him until the terror faded. He was home now, he told himself, and his PENIS was verified. And Julia was home from jail, too, his mom had said, so everything would be okay. It was quiet in the house. There had been a lot of crying in the jail. He heard it all the time, but more than ever when it was night and he was trying to sleep. Some of the boys cried until the guards yelled at them, and even then they cried. Even when the guard called them pussies, they cried. Terrence hadn’t cried because he hadn’t wanted to get yelled at, and he hadn’t wanted the guards to call him pussy. He didn’t know what that word meant (Something about a cat?), but he knew it was bad to be a pussy because of the way the guards yelled it.
He let himself cry a little now because he knew Sergeant Teddy wouldn’t call him a pussy. “Everything’s going to be okay,” Terrence whispered to Sergeant Teddy.
“That’s right, Terry,” Sergeant Teddy responded in Terrence’s imagination. Sergeant Teddy could also call Terrence “Terry” because the government didn’t send him letters either. “Everything’s going to be okay now.”
“I can still be president one day,” Terrence told Sergeant Teddy. “Daddy says you can still be president even if you go to jail sometimes, but you can’t go to jail too much or they don’t let you be president. So I’m going to try real hard not to go to jail again.”
“Sounds like a plan, champ. Mind the borders, and you’ll be just fine,” Sergeant Teddy advised in the wise, grown-up voice Terrence imagined for him.
“Mind the borders,” Terrence repeated reverently, and fell asleep once more.
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