Frenzy

Henrietta Calverson was exactly six minutes, outside of Tutwiler Women’s Correctional in Wetumpka, Alabama when she saw a sharply dressed woman approaching her in the parking lot.

The woman was the polar opposite of Henrietta in every way: Henrietta was wearing the grey, sweat-stained sweat suit she went inside wearing. The woman approaching her was wearing a black pencil skirt and a sleeveless blouse that oozed money.

“Ms. Henrietta Calverson,” the woman said. Her hair was blonde, uptight, and looked like it cost every dollar of the four hundred and seventeen that Henrietta “earned” taking out trash in the admin offices over her sentence. “This is for you,” the woman said and extended a manila envelope. It was the padded kind and, as Henrietta received it, she found it had more weight than she expected.

In prison, when someone in those kinds of clothes handed you something, you took it. You took it and you said-

“Thank you ma’am.” The woman turned and walked back the way she’d come through the parking lot with the surefooted grace of a runway model. Henrietta felt like she’d been suckered, and that wasn’t a feeling anybody liked. “Hey!” Henrietta called after her.

“You have 24 hours. I suggest you don’t waste time with questions,” the woman said at a volume that said she wasn’t about to raise her voice to address one of the forgotten ones like Henrietta was.

She was forgotten. No siblings, no living parents, and not a breath-drawing soul alive who would even put her up for her first night of freedom.

Henrietta opened her mouth to call after Ms. All Business and No Time, but then shut it again. What would she ask? It was probably court papers. Probably a summons. Probably lots of bad news that always hung just off-scene in Henrietta’s life. Like the cop who’d sold her the weed, bad news was waiting with a too-good-to-be-true every time and always.

And that thought, the hushed whisper of her returning back to a cell, back to a schedule, and at least back to people who knew who she was and cared, offered her a perverse sense of hope. It wasn’t real hope, not the kind the remembered people had about Christmas and birthdays. No, it was the kind of hope that told the forgotten that maybe they could work something out and not die alone.

Henrietta shoved a finger into the gap just above the seal of the envelope and then jaggedly ripped it open. She opened the envelope and was more perplexed than she’d been up to that point.

Inside the envelope was one of those notebooks with the elastic band and the not-quite-leather covers; moleskin or was it Moleskine with that British ‘e’ hanging off the end? She only knew something close to the name because her momma used to keep up with her budget in one. Didn’t believe in computers and once even told Henrietta that fax machines were satanic, she did believe in writing every single thing down in that ledger and when it was full? She got another.

It made her think of Momma, but Momma was six years in the ground and mail was hard to deliver from the afterlife.

Next to the notebook was a pen. Nothing fancy, but it wasn’t bad either. They had the worst pens in Tutwiler. The pen in the envelope was a clicky one, that said G-2 on it. On one side of the notebook was another envelope, but this one was a regular, white letter-sized envelope.

Her name was typed onto the envelope, not printed on a printer. Nothing else was on the outside, but Henrietta was sure it was a typewriter that had put her name in that specific kind of letter. The inner envelope was thick.

Most people didn’t bother nesting envelopes unless-

Henrietta snatched and fumbled the inner envelope, nearly dropping the whole business, and opened the seal. Inside was a stack of hundreds, banded with a yellow tape that read, $10,000 just beside Ben Franklin’s smirking face.

$10,000 was in her hands and she still didn’t know why. She immediately sealed the white envelope back as best she could, feeling a panicky sense of guilt over having received such a thing. It was a trick. It was that just-off-scene bad news. That much money meant something more than her previous sentence; that was capital. It was a whole other class of crime.

Henrietta fished the notebook out and slid the elastic back to open the cover. She turned to see the ivory pages, crisp, new, and already written on:

Henrietta Calverson:

The handwriting was neat, but masculine, Henrietta thought. It looked like a lawyer’s handwriting. It was more than legible, but it had a forceful swish and swoosh to the letters, dragging them above and then beneath the simple lines on the page.

It continued:

I have no intention of revealing who I am, but I came across a piece of your work while you were incarcerated. It was a poem titled, “Frenzy.” You might remember it or you might not, but you wrote about a prison fight that almost took one of your fingers off.

Your poem, eight lines of it, never left my mind from that day forward. I resolved that when you should leave that cage, you’d have room to spread your wings and fly. If I know you as I think I do, you have seen the ten thousand dollars already. That’s yours to keep, no matter what. If you desire, you can stop reading now, and throw away the notebook and the pen or keep them and not do what I propose.

But if you want the second ten thousand dollars, you will agree to the following.

In the next twenty-four hours, you will write a poem and give it to every possible stranger you can. You will rip the pages of this journal out and give these poems away. They will belong to whomever you give them to, but you cannot keep even a single page of this notebook.

I’m watching you, but you won’t find me until I am satisfied that this little game has been played in full. The clock began when you received the envelope.

Sincerely yours,

Your Biggest Fan

A car passed on Highway 231 in front of the prison, blaring some rock song she didn’t recognize. There were three birds on the powerlines directly above her. She could hear the women in the yard behind her. She could feel the slight sheen of sweat forming on her brow.

She remembered the poem, Frenzy. She remembered the feeling of writing it, and she remembered reading it for some kind of live stream internet thing that some charity did. They said anyone in the world might have seen it.

Henrietta thumbed through the pages, but there were no numbers on them, just lines. Her momma would have known how many pages there were. It didn’t matter. $10,000 was amazing, but $20,000? $20,000 could turn into something. $20,000 was a whole life because someone had remembered one of the forgotten.

She attached the pen’s clip to the elastic, folded the manila over the white envelope, stuffed both into the butt of her sweats and then looked left and right. There was a skinny white guy with a camouflage rebel flag hat leaning against a pickup that was lifted high with mud tires.

“Hey!” she called and smiled. He looked over at her, sure she was mistaken. “Hundred bucks to get me to Montgomery right now!” she called. He shrugged and gave her a little ‘come on’ nod.

He didn’t start it up after she got in.

“You said a hundred?” he asked, looking doubtful. She fished and finagled the envelope without showing him the contents and then handed him the bill. “Ok, I guess.”

His poem was titled, “I hate your damn hat,” and she scrawled it on the way through Wetumpka proper, passing the Winn-Dixie. It was all about how that wasn’t even the true confederate flag and that he’d just taken to using it because it let him fit in. He was a dumb redneck, and he’d been sold a bill of goods.

He made her read it to him a second time, when they were cresting the hill and headed down into the home stretch to Montgomery.

A third time when they reached downtown, without saying any words in between.

When she got out of the truck, he asked for his copy before she even explained what she was doing. She ripped it out and handed it over.

Then there was the lawyer couple in front of the state supreme court building. She cried and he couldn’t stop smiling. The young trio of black guys riding bikes too small for any of them all took theirs and called her dope. She was sweating through her sweats by that point and tried to buy a drink, but the little corner shop near the fountain wouldn’t take a hundred. They gave her a bottle of water instead. She knew she probably stank, but she didn’t care.

By full noon, she was up to thirty. Her hand was cramping. She didn’t care. Every person she saw, including the cops who stopped her, got asked and got a poem. The cops offered to take her to the homeless shelter for the rest of the day. She thanked them and said she wasn’t homeless. Their poems included some serious shade thrown at the cops.

By 2:00, she’d worn through the layer of skin on her writer’s callus and it was complaining every time she wrote. The drug store had Band-Aids and they broke a hundred, giving her Band-Aids, ibuprofen, and a Coke.

At 3:00, with the sun cutting shadows crossways between the buildings, she was up to 72. Two homeless guys thanked her and told everybody a crazy lady was making up poems on the spot.

The notebook was living a life through as she went. Her fingerprints weren’t showing on the black covers, but the edges of the unwritten pages were taking on smudges and marks. The pen was holding strong, but her right hand felt like it might seize up and not let go at any minute.

When 4:00 rolled around, she knew she had to have a plan. There was a coffee shop near the fountain and she walked in, enjoying the gust of air conditioning, but panicked to see almost no one inside.

“Any chance I could write here?” she asked the barista.

“Write what?”

“Uh, I mean, if it’s not…” Henrietta started. She didn’t know how to explain

“Henrietta? Stop,” a voice said behind her. It wasn’t the lady from before. It was an older Hispanic man, with nice clothes and, of all things, a fedora.

“Are you…” Henrietta began, but had no idea how to finish asking. Her finger was bleeding, slowly, through her Band-Aid. Her hand was screaming.

“I didn’t… I never thought you’d… here,” he said, and extended another white envelope. On the front was typed the words, “You did it,” from the same typewriter that had embossed her name on the envelope that was now collecting sweat under her pants.

“I didn’t finish, I still have time,” she said. He shook his head.

“Let’s sit, and I can let you finish the last ones with me,” he said. She took the second envelope, slowly, as though he might snatch it back. “You weren’t forgotten,” he said.

…

Frenzy

Angie said she didn’t mean it,

When my finger caught in the cell door,

She cried when I told her I might not

write again.

She said when things go wrong,

they go wrong all together,

In a frenzy of passion,

the forgotten just want to be remembered.

By Henrietta Calverson