DUST AND MUD by Sarah Mattern
With her past catching up to her, will Bomber Girl become the hero of her own story?
Read an excerpt…
Chapter 1
Ellie
Everything in prison is beige.
The cinderblock walls, the epoxy floors, the inmate uniforms. Even the women here, despite our various complexions, carry something of beige around our eyes.
I’m beige. Hair, skin, mood. I blend into this place well.
Anna and I are standing outside our cell for evening headcount. The voices of the fifty-odd women in our pod reverberate around the open common room before us. Anna’s adding her voice to the clamor, telling me all about the latest book she read—something about past lives and reincarnation.
“If it weren’t for the beauty, the trees and the flowers and things,” she’s saying, “I’m not sure I’d ever come back here. It’s too much trouble, you know?”
“Here?”
“Here, you know, back to Earth,” Anna goes on.
I nod slowly, trying not to let my confusion show. But I’m thinking, Really Anna? Trees and flowers? Here?
We stop talking as our unit officer passes our cell. “Dray,” she barks at me and throws an envelope in my direction. “You got a letter.” I catch the paper between both hands, and the officer walks on.
Ellie Dray is scribbled on the front of the envelope in messy blue ink, along with my ID and the prison address. I look at the return information:
The Watering Hole
County Road A7
Belleville, California
For a moment, I’m jolted somewhere else, away from all the beige to a time and place when a note in blue handwriting meant the world to me. That other note was just a torn piece of binder paper resting on my dorm room desk, but it was written by Ben for me, so it was everything. I wonder whatever happened to that momentarily-cherished scrap of paper. I suppose, like all of my belongings from my college dorm room, it was scoured through, boxed up for evidence, or destroyed.
I read the paper again: Ellie Dray and the numbers 01083-696. I run a finger across the frayed edge where the envelope was roughly opened, a sign that someone else inspected this letter before it made its way to me.
I’m not Ellie Dray anymore. I’m prisoner 01083-696, or more often simply Dray. I’ve been this other person for four years now. She’s hard, aloof, and dull, and I’ve gotten used to her, which is a good thing because I’ve got four more years of her to go.
After that, well. . . the future’s uncertain. It probably includes a halfway house and an invisible job like cleaning dishes or stocking shelves. It’ll be a simple life, right? Isn’t that what I always wanted?
Except the person I used to be, this carefree Ellie Dray, she thought simple meant living a life that was different from her parents. Not continually striving to do more, be more, have more—instead making room for the people and things that mattered, whatever the hell that meant.
But today, the only thing clear in my hazy future, like the single spot wiped clean in a dirty windowpane, is that no one else will be there.
“You okay, Dray?” Anna’s staring at me with a look of concern.
I’m still motionless in front of our cell even though headcount is over. “Fine.”
“Sure? Cause you look like you swallowed a ghost.” Anna beams, a lopsided dimple appearing in the scar that runs down the side of her face. “I can see right through you—you got a letter from a man.” Anna draws out the last word, maaan, and wiggles her fingers in the air like she’s sprinkling fairy dust around.
Everything in prison is beige—that is, except for my cellmate Anna.
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