Ohio State Prison - Part 1 - Saint Francesca of Frankincense

Frankincense.  Smelled like the inside of a church.  She never much cared for the rules of the whole thing.  Confessing every little thing that might have been wrong, then hail marying it all back to a clean slate.  Like eating your own tail, digging yourself into the hole, kicking yourself out of it again, that sloping bed of dirt always there, waiting for you, warm as a mother but dirty and empty too.  Why confess to them anyway.  Them and their secret families, gambling addictions and little altar boys, mouths all sewn together into a patchwork vestment.  But the vestments got her hot, if on one of the younger priests.  Cassocks, some might say was a dress, but when the set of priests not much older than her older brother came walking down the halls, smelling of books and bourbon, she'd watch the black smooth fabric just above sweeping the floor and wonder if they were still men underneath all that.  What were they trying to hide out from, still and sound in their long black capes.  They looked like aristocrats from those novels they learned about in high school.  Their eyes darting from something she could not see, the keen air they kept close behind them as they went. 

She wasn't telling them anything, not in school when she was busy tearing up her plaid skirt to let them know just how she worshipped at the altar of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  The Holy Three was mainly useful when it was shouted out by an unscrupulous superior, when taking the Lord's name in vain was the only time he served any purpose to her.  Now, here, in jail, it wasn't any different.  Francesca worked her ass off in here, sewing torn vestments for the chapel services and dusting the minimal of statues that the prison chapel had to offer.  There was no incense in here, not sure the reason, perhaps it would incite the women to something.  It always turned her on.  Just like she said, the rules and regulations were never high up on her list of favourite things, but the rituals were like time slowed down into something.  Life outside of the mass was boring, happening in real time, murky colours and dull voices not saying or breathing anything particularly useful or of interest to Francesca.  But time stopped when those young priests would speak in Latin, the silky sound of their cassocks drifting past her as they went, swinging smokey smells of Frankincense.  The flickering candles, just like those which alighted near her swinging legs just now, made what happened around those moments like being caught inside those statues, with no one looking in on you. 

Before her life shred into the many separate and chaotic directions it did, before she fucked up royally as her mother would say, and got herself locked up in here, and certainly before she gave into those experiences which called her name and decided it was her place, that dirt bed practically holding up a sign for her to just lie down, without penance and without any hope of ever digging herself out again, Francesca used to read books about Jesus' crucifixion.  She was obsessive about it.  She read about all the things they did to him - the thorns, the humiliation, the hot sun bearing down on the cracks in his sweaty skin, burning alive up there by Choice.  That part she couldn't bear to think about.  It made her cry sometimes, to think of him up there, all alone in the world.  Maybe that's why she loved being in churches so much - being in this prison chapel any chance she got, the sense of sanctity caught underneath her fingernails as she dug them harder into the back of his neck.  This was all part of the ritual too, wasn't it.  On the outside, she ended up fucking her big, fat and ugly landlord to keep her mother in that apartment, and all the schemes and ideas he had, and the others, always making her do all the hard work, and take the fall when it came around checking beds at night.  It was fine.  It got her in here, and her ability to sew and clean (and probably her Italian name, what did these fucking fools know of anything - they wouldn't know a transubstantiation if the wine/blood and host/flesh came up and bit them in the ass).  Just like he bit her back from behind her right now. 

This was the ultimate ritual happening in the dark of the two only cheap candles (electric flicker of course, so people like Francesca couldn't burn it down to the ground and end the blatant miseries of all those other so called lives in there).  Frankie might have the warden, but she found herself one prison priest who happened to like girls and not slender little fags like Frankie.  Late afternoon, but it was indeed dark in there.  Closed so the floors could be polished, and she was being fucked left right and center, just like the good catholic that she was.  Reading psalms, placing bets on the number of bite marks and bruises from his priestly hands that she'd be hiding when back in the mix with those other sorrowful bitches, herself shining out among them, a saint among men and women, not like those cold, frigid statues who looked down on us all with half open eyes, needing dusting in their ears, not even bearing of cunts.  Her cunt was the saintliest part of her, the one part which didn't make mistakes and give into circumstance and find new ways of losing.  She felt particularly like Mary Magdalen, the so called whore, who Jesus loved the most (who stayed there at his feet, he hanging there extended over his bed of dirt, the one they made for him), she felt like double M Mary when the rosary of this visiting priest dangling clean into her mouth, the body of Jesus the Lord drowning in between her pliable lips as she bit down hard on the nails which kept him in his place....his hidden cock dipping into the holy waters between her legs, on the chapel floor, slippery and shiny and freshly buffed, just like every Friday afternoon.

Going to confession was never as transformative as all this.  The nearby cheap folding chairs making the slightest knocking noise as he forced himself deeper into her, Jesus in her mouth, his priestly foot soldier's cock making short work of the holiest unspoken words being etched along the walls of her cunt, the sanctimonious halls which shudder and shook, like those evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah must have when the big, mean God of old stamped them out.  He'd fuck every sin clean out of her, and she'd be saintly, just like she always wanted to be.  Who'd have thought she would have found that in this place.  Second hand bibles shifting in their secondhand, movable pews.  They weren't allowed frankincense in here, which Francesca had mentioned before.  But, as he licked the back slope of her neck and came inside her from behind, his hair tickling her just behind her right ear - Francesca could swear she smelled the smoky, comforting smell of frankincense wafting a halo around her fuck knotted hair with reverence and respect for all of her sacrifices, from the start until now.  It felt and smelled like books she couldn't make out the words to and would never read, her scabbed knees left kneeling on the liquid shine of the chapel wood floor.  While she moaned her best cry for Jesus and took in a good, long breath of his Kingdom, as it came with all the imperfect glory it could muster.    She had exactly 14 minutes to get back to the cell block.

M. Lucia