The brutal blows rained down on my body amidst his screams and my shrieks.

“Motherfucker!” he shouted as he struck me in the back of the head. Shockwaves rattled through my teeth. “This cell is mine!”

I coughed blood and struggled to my hands and knees.

He stepped around the side of me and violently booted me in the ribs. I collapsed immediately to the ground, covered my head with my hands and sucked desperately for air. The cracking sound from my chest scared me as much as his words.

“Everything in this fucking cell is mine!” His voice strained with rage.

Laying face down, I didn’t see him move quickly behind me. He swung a violent kick into my groin which lifted me off the ground and forced me to vomit over the concrete.

“Don’t puke on my fuckin’ floor!”

I gasped for oxygen with my face lying in my own vomit, the smell of which burned my nostrils.

I heard him moving before I felt his weight on my back. He grabbed my hair and yanked my head back. I could feel his hot breath in my ear and the whiff of his body odor temporarily blocked out the smell of vomit.

“Like I said, everything in this fucking cell is mine. That includes you.”

I felt the bile rising again in my stomach.

“Don’t ever tell me no again.”

I blacked out when he slammed my head against the floor.

Her eyes have seen all of your sins, but love you anyway. The eyes haunt you in your dreams and warm you in the cold. The eyes beg for your love, the love she has been denied. It’s the eyes that break your heart. I have painted an image of her in my mind from their descriptions. Sometimes I love her. Most of the times, though, I wish I could kill her.

I’ve killed before. A woman that I once loved. It wasn’t as hard as I had imagined. I saw murderers on television and wondered just how in the hell they could kill someone. I could never understand the lack of empathy it took to end the life of another human being. Now, I understand fully.

I wrapped my hands around Lorraine’s throat after she told me she wanted a divorce. She warned me that she was taking my kids, taking my house, taking everything I worked for. She said she knew about the babysitter and the abortion. She promised she would tell everyone. I couldn’t have that. I worked too hard and too long for her to rip it away from me. She dug her manicured nails into my face as she died.

When it was done, I stood over her and for a second thought about how easy killing her truly was. Then I picked up the phone and called the police.

Exquisite wings extend from her back. Some describe the wings as being golden while others say they are like clouds. No one disagrees with their beauty. But the wings can’t compare to the eyes that stare at you knowingly.

They assigned me to cell block C after I pled guilty to second degree murder. It wasn’t premeditated so they couldn’t charge first degree. The judge sentenced me to twenty years without batting an eye. The Old Testament demands an eye for and eye, but I killed my wife and got twenty years. I really don’t think the judge cared whether or not I went away. He consulted a little card before determining the amount of time he handed out.

While in the courtroom, my attorney whispered into my ear that if I could avoid trouble, I’d be out in twelve years. That sounded good at the time, but even twelve minutes with the Hammer is too long.

Elroy Samuel Hawkins is my cellmate. He’s six feet two, two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and hate. He shaves his head bald every morning. If you look closely enough, you can see his brown hair is receding. With his permanent scowl, everyone gives Elroy Hawkins a wide berth.

They call him the Hammer because he bludgeoned two families to death with a wooden handled tool of the same name. He slipped into the first house and killed an elderly couple along with their visiting one year-old grandson. The second family of victims was a young couple and their three daughters. He was shot when he broke into the third house which happened to be owned by a city police officer.

By the time Hawkins made it to the hospital, he was in critical condition. The staff worked for hours to save the killer’s life. When they walked away from the table, Hawkins lay in critical but stable condition with the rest of his life still in front of him. Unfortunately, there were eight bodies in the morgue that the Hammer had to answer for. He agreed to life in prison to avoid a trial with the death penalty looming over him.

The prosecuting attorney’s office made a big show of how they saved the city the expense of a trial that would have surely been a media fiasco. Nothing drives ratings like the horror of a murder spree shown repeatedly on the evening news. In protecting their decision not to go to trial, the attorneys also argued that the death penalty wasn’t guaranteed even with a guilty conviction. The final point in defending their position was that Hawkins’ plea actually protected the city against the murderer being ruled insane and avoiding prison all together by way of a mental institution.

Hawkins was insane, though. And he’d been raised in the system of orphanages, foster homes, juvenile detention and finally prison. He’d been out of jail for a total of three weeks before his killing spree with the hammer. Hawkins needed to get back to prison where he had power, where he was respected, where he understood the rules. It hardly seemed fair that someone like me – someone who’d never thought about murder until that fateful moment – should have to share a cell with this tower of evil.

Three days after the first beating he ever gave me, Hawkins forced my head into a pillow with his massive hand. Two members of his crew held me down as Hawkins pulled my pants down over my ass.

“Baby,” he growled, “now you’re really gonna find out why they call me the Hammer.”

I screamed as he pushed inside me. His cronies laughed wildly.

One of them asked if he could take a turn on me when he was done.

Between grunts, Hawkins growled, “No way, this bitch is mine now and I ain’t sharin’. Virgin pussy is hard to find.”

The woman wasn’t born of love or faith. The beauty that brought hope to others sprang from the evil minds of men. Only one wicked man knew her perfect curves through his touch. I’ve touched her in the dark but can’t distinguish her beauty.

Prison is tough for guys like me. Good men, who but for a moment in time, have never committed a single crime. Men whose number one priority in life is seeking the comfort of status and wealth. Men like that, men like me, are fodder for the prison system. Wherever the prison, the moment we walk in we’re like sheep thrown into a lion’s pride.

When the needle first pricked my skin, I jumped but the hands held me down. I’d never felt it before. They say some get addicted to the sensation. I hated it. I wanted to scream but Hawkins had stuffed his sweaty t-shirt in my mouth.

The Hammer leaned over me so I could see his face. “Boy, you move again and fuck up the line, I’m gonna beat your ass.”

Hawkins had brought The Marvel to our cell to ink me. They called him The Marvel because of his artwork and the huge Spider-man tattoo he carried across his back. In the real world, Tony Johnson had earned his living as a tattoo artist. That was before he fell in love with meth. Once he picked up his second strike for manufacturing, the system sent him here where his talents were soon discovered by the general population.

When the cronies finally let me up, The Marvel had already packed up and left the cell. Hawkins smiled at the new artwork that adorned the chest above my heart.

An evil smile spread on his face. “You ruin that tat, baby, by doing something stupid and I’ll hurt you. Bad. You’ll wish you never met me.”

I didn’t tell him that I already wished that. I stepped over to the wall and gazed into the small round mirror on our wall. I saw the reflection and started to cry.

Hawkins came up behind me and rubbed my shoulders as the tears left tracks down my face.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it baby?” His raspy voice crawled into my ears and sent shivers through the sinews of my body.

On my chest, about three inches in length, shone the fresh ink of a hammer. I bit my lip and closed my eyes from the sight.

I felt Hawkins’ lips on my neck. “It’s so beautiful.”

Her skin is white like mine, I know that much. It’s blemish free. She has no moles, no scars and no freckles. She is pure. Even though she is free from sin, evil adores her beauty and longs for just a single glance at her perfect skin.

They attacked me in the shower. Two Hispanic inmates I’d never seen before. It was the one hundred and seventy-sixth day of my sentence. The two, a small portly guy with pocked skin and his skeletal-like partner, surrounded me. I had just finished shampooing my hair, the white foam still dripping down to my chest.

“Where’s your precious Hammer, ese?” the fat one asked.

I eyed both of them and slowly braced myself for a fight. “Don’t know. Don’t really care.”

“Trouble in paradise?” The skinny one asked as he continued to soap up his genitals.

“Fuck off,” I barked at the skeleton.

My head snapped as the fat one pushed me. I fell forward and skidded across the wet concrete. The fat bastard cracked a joke about me dropping the soap.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw the skinny one stroking his cock and smiling at me. “Been a while since I had me some white ass,” he giggled.

When I felt the fat one grab at my waist, I fought back violently. I rolled over and kicked the fat boy in his testicles. He screamed and clutched wildly at his groin. I scrambled up on the wet ground and turned around to face the skinny one.

He ran at me, his cock bouncing like a spear leading the way. I threw a punch at him, but he slipped under it and nailed me in the side of my stomach. I fell to the ground, hugging my side.

The skinny one planted a couple more shots to my face before I ended up sprawled out on the cement shower room floor. They stood over me, smiling.

“The meat’s always sweeter when they fight,” skinny said while breathing heavily.

The fat one got down on his knees and touched his limp cock to my lips. “Suck this hard, bitch, ‘cause if you don’t, your life won’t be worth shit.”

I opened my mouth to him, afraid to fight back anymore.

The skinny one moved behind me.

“Double-teaming a white boy,” the skeleton giggled as he rammed into me.

When I heard a new set of footsteps enter the shower room, I felt the warm embrace of darkness work its way over me. Before I passed out, I saw the Hammer walking with a mop handle clenched in his meaty fist and realized with terror just what the two families saw when he was in their homes.

The pain that the woman was born out of lingers. It is always there on the fringes of memory, teasing the imagination that the birth is somehow continuous. I know her pain even though my eyes have shunned her image.

Several weeks passed before Hawkins was brought back to our cell. He spent the time in solitary, relishing the destruction he brought to the Hispanics. He beat both of them with his fists and the mop handle. He broke the fat one’s elbow and cheek bone. The skinny one wasn’t as lucky. He lost an eye, most of his teeth and ended up with the mop handle in his rectum. Blood was everywhere in the shower room by the time the medics helped me. Some of it was mine, but not much.

With Hawkins in solitary, I often smiled to myself about the damage he did to those two. But my joy in his revenge was quickly replaced with the realization why he did it.

“You know you owe me, right?” Hawkins asked when he sat down next to me on my bunk. The springs moaned under his weight.

I nodded with that awareness that the repayment of my sins had only just begun.

“Well, I know how you can make it up to me. I thought about it non-stop while in the hole. It kept me going.”

The needle prick on my lower back was familiar, but again unwanted. However, I didn’t fight back this time. I knew it would be worthless.

Instead, I tried to picture the lake cabin I once owned and the way the sun shone off of the water. We spent a couple of peaceful summers there as a young family. The image glowed with intensity in my mind. I prayed for God to wake me from my nightmare and place me on the white sand of the beach. God ignored my plea.

During the initial inking, my knees were on the concrete while I laid chest down on my bunk. We had to stop several times so I could get up and let the blood return to my knees. Whenever there was a break, I would walk to the corner of our cell and just lean into it, my head pressed against the concrete walls.

After the first session, The Marvel let me stand while he finished the filling in and touch-up.

The whole process took several weeks to finish. I never spoke during any of it. I would just take it quietly and clean up the bloody cloths the Marvel used while he inked my back. Every time the Marvel finished a different portion of the tattoo, Hawkins beamed with pride and excitement.

When the process was complete, the Marvel left the room after receiving some words of praise from Hawkins and his friends. Hawkins told them to leave and came over to me as I leaned into the corner.

“It’s beautiful, baby.” His raspy voice filled me with dread.

“I’m sure it is,” I croaked out, fighting hard to keep the tears back.

“She’s absolutely beautiful. Wanna see? We could grab the mirror and go to the one in the shower so you can check it out.”

“I don’t want to see it,” I said softly, the bile building up in my throat.

“Why not,” the Hammer asked, his voice turning hard.

“Because it’s yours,” I replied, picking my words carefully. “She is for you.”

The Hammer stepped up behind me and slid his hand around to my bare stomach. “You know, you’ve made me very happy.”

“I owed you,” I said sadly.

“Come here,” he purred and guided me away from the corner. He pushed me down onto the bunk and gently pulled the underwear from my ass.

“She really is beautiful. She’s like an angel.”

I ground my teeth as he pushed inside. The thought of spending twenty years in Hawkins’ cell over-whelmed me and I felt my stomach burning.

“You’re my angel,” he said after an excited grunt. I felt his fingers carefully outlining the tattoo on my lower back while he kept his left hand on my hip. “You are such a beautiful fucking woman.”

My fists clenched the blanket on my bunk as his rhythm increased. His voice and breathing were excited as he made love to the angelic vision on my lower back. “I love you, Angel,” he moaned.

I bit the inside of my cheek to stop from crying.