I walked nonchalantly over to her service cart and there, on top, in a yellow box with big English lettering on it was a supply of good ol’ Glad garbage bags from the US! Needless to say, I pilfered one, rolled it up tightly, put it mostly hidden under my arm, managed to sneak it back inside, and slipped it under my cot mattress. Now I had my balloon!
Over the next few days, I rooted around, trying not to draw suspicion, and came up with everything else I needed to make my “message balloon,” as I’d come to think of it. I found a couple long, thin strips of wood – like two triple-length chopsticks, and some duct tape. (Yep, the stuff you know. I think it can be found everywhere on Earth). I couldn’t find even a scrap of paper. The Control Institution didn’t want inmates writing notes to each other, so they controlled that medium as best they could. Eventually, I found a scrap of cardboard big enough, but nothing with which to write.
I decided to create my own pen, by taking one of the thin pieces of wood, and charring the end with my lighter. Then I began to write on the cardboard, re-charring the end as I needed. I brushed off the cardboard to see if the writing stayed readable, and it did. Only Altaf saw me do this, no one else.
For the next 20 minutes, I tried to let her know what I was planning to do. By the time I ran out of ways to act this out, I was pretty sure she got it.
I carefully crafted a note in English. It read, “HUGE REWARD OFFERED! US Dollars! Contact any American! Tell them you’ve found a missing American archeologist who goes by the name of Karimah. Call the United States at 01-283-555-2279. Tell everyone I am trapped in the Control Institution for Delinquent Women in the Kingdom of Salat, in Eritrea.”
The number was my parents’ land-line number. Writing it was very strange to me. I remembered their number without difficulty, but I couldn’t visualize what either of them looked like, nor could I remember what their first names or surname were. I only hoped that my description of me as an archeologist would convince whoever answered the call that I tried to communicate, if I, myself, had gone by another name than Karimah.
Of course, I wasn’t at all certain that this was going to work.
Though Altaf had seen me, I was reluctant to tell anyone else what I planned to do, lest they get in serious trouble should my plan be exposed. So with Altaf and me blocking the camera in my triple bedroom with our bodies, I bent over my work.
Using tape, I fastened the long chopstick-like sticks into a cross and taped them to the open end of the garbage bag to hold it open. I taped the cardboard message to the top of the bag. I sealed the end of the tube with duct tape and stuffed a piece of absorbent cloth into it. I used the same small bottle my group acquaintance had used to flame that surprised triple, and doused the rag-filled tube with lighter fluid. I expected to light it outside, wait while it inflated the garbage bag, and let it fly into the air and away from the prison.
In the end, I let Erij know what I was planning. As soon as she understood what I planned to do, she wanted to join us. In the middle of a moonless night she, Altaf and I snuck outside to launch the makeshift hot air balloon from the darkest part of the unguarded recreation area. There was no need for guards after all; no one could mount an escape here.
Altaf and Erij held the bag up as I lit my burner, the lighter-fluid filled-candle.
It appeared that there wasn’t enough heat to produce sufficient hot air to inflate the bag. I was at a loss, until Altaf rushed back into the dormitory building and returned with a metal waste basket, filled with a small amount of combustible trash. She wanted me to light it, which I did. It flamed, but I didn’t think too brightly. Then she and Erij immediately held the hot air balloon over the flaming basket. It instantly inflated, and we struggled to hold it down, as I lit the candle again. Altaf and Erij released it and it soared into the black night sky – up, up, and up!
It was several hundred feet overhead and the cool, late night wind off the desert was beginning to blow it away. As it appeared to clear the prison walls, I saw the burning, lighter fluid candle fall over against one of the supporting strips of wood. The fluid must have spilled along the wood because the flames shot down the wood strip and reached the plastic bag. No sooner had that happened than the entire bag burst into flames, having been lit by the candle engine. My hot air balloon crashed in flames to the desert floor, perhaps a quarter mile past the wall.
It had been a long-shot, and I understood that. But I was hoping for the best. My hopes crashed into the barren soil along with the flaming bag. Fortunately, what we had attempted was never discovered.
**********
I realized that I was glad I was now a smoker, and it went beyond the addiction they’d given me. It was about the only, tiny pleasure we had in this miserable place, where the staff had virtually total control over our minds and bodies. In addition, of course, there was the hint of carnality and the slight turn on that I got from each one. Never enough, but it was something. Even with only that tiny arousal I had, in my own mind, completely coupled the addiction of smoking with my requisite but unfulfilled addiction to sex. They’d found a way to keep us Control Institution smokers reminded of our sexuality, while always being tortured with the frustration of unfulfilled desire. We were barely able to start along the path to arousal, before we hit a dead end.
Nevertheless, over my time there, I observed that the women in the non-smoking resident groups were consistently more morose than the smokers. Oh, a few groups realized some titillation from their caning habit, but most only had shaving to substitute for the loss of their sexuality. Other than their daily grooming, they had nothing to sooth their minds and bodies, and nothing to remind them that they had been sexual beings before they were stripped of their capabilities as a woman by being controlled.
That first day for lunch (they called the meals dinner and supper), I sat at the feeding station in our resident group quarters and sucked down my portion of prisoner porridge. As a skinny newcomer to a chubby resident group, I was also required to eat the same gruel again, just before lights-out and first thing in the morning, to fatten me up. I found out later that the porridge at those non-standard feeding times, for those of us who were required to take it, contained three times the calories of the regular slop. Those special feedings were designed to pack on the pounds, not maintain our normal or prison-designated weight.
A matron always came by to watch me swallow the paste during those meals. She stayed there for another half hour, to make sure I didn’t puke it up. I never could understand why. They’d ordered me to eat, in order to make me plump, so that’s what my well-controlled mind was determined to do. Even thinking about not obeying them regarding my eating made me intolerably anxious. Not following that direct order was unthinkable.
In addition, the bathrooms were all monitored from somewhere in the prison control centers – by a group of sick perverts, I presume. So if I somehow managed to get myself to toss my cookies there, they’d know. If I did it elsewhere, they’d know because of inmates ratting me out in exchange for some nebulous, anticipated, but rarely delivered privileges. If I didn’t gain five pounds per week in my initial days at the prison, they would force-feed me in the clinic for a week. Even though we couldn’t talk among ourselves, I found out early on that you DID NOT want to be force-fed.
When I arrived at the prison, I weighed 110 pounds (50 kilograms), and my height was the same as it was when I was 21 years old: five feet, four inches (162 centimeters). They intended to bump me up to 163 to 165 pounds (74 or 75 kilograms). That was expected to happen in a little over TWO MONTHS! If it didn’t, I’d be beaten, force-fed, and the controller would be used to give me an obsessive, unrelenting appetite. At that point, I’d be allowed (or required) to ‘suck the tubes,’ as the matrons called it, any time I wanted for the next few months. And the compulsion would force me to suck gruel most all the time. That usually resulted in something over twice the targeted weight-gain, and the inmate would be stuck there once her weight shot up to whatever it got to. If t
hat happened, I’d be assigned to the highest, weight group, the greatly obese zenay vizhiden.
The threat of even worse obesity was one of the things that made us (including me) eat everything we needed to get to and stay at the weight they wanted us to be: gaunt, thin, average, plump, chubby, fat, or greatly obese.
Apparently, Altaf and Erij had been as thin as I was, when they’d first come to the prison. Now they were comfortably plump, even chubby. Why had that happened to them? Luck of the draw.
I didn’t want it, but for me, chubby had become the target, most-desirable, and earnestly-hoped-for configuration of my body. If I failed to achieve that, they would make me morbidly obese. That’s just the way they thought about things. If you didn’t do what they wanted, they made you do far more than they initially wanted. Through threats of controller-induced obedience, actual abuse, threatened punishment to come, and the specter of compulsive, uncontrollable eating, they forced me to embrace their ideal of the inmate in my particular resident group. They made me determined to get there to avoid worse fates, and because they’d programmed it into my mind.
In this dreadful place, there were no boyfriends to impress, no lesbian or bi lovers to entice, no one at all to care how we looked. Having a lover when you have no sexual response is pointless, because there’s nothing satisfying that you can do about it.
There was little in the way of physical attractiveness either. None of us hairless female apes was gonna win any beauty contest. The bodies of some of the nochhadn, which I’d been myself, when I arrived, or the average-build motowoseik were pretty sexy, but since you couldn’t satisfy or act on any twinges of arousal, pretty quickly, almost nothing aroused you anymore.
Long after my initiation to that underworld of controlled women, I was still only comfortable when I was a fatter gal. Yeah I, Karimah, at that early time in my prison life, and even after I’d moved on to another, different life, can’t tolerate the idea of being slender, thin, or anything with fewer curves. They fucked me up and made me want to be – no, need to be – a chubby young woman. Deep in my soul, I want to be thin, but the idea of it makes me so anxious that I could never consent to be there. In me, the prison tried to create a life-time, compulsively plump girl. I don’t know what the future holds for me in that regard, but I’m that woman right now, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.
In this part of the world, that is actually a valued way to be.
Thinking back on even my first night in the prison proper, I slept more-or-less soundly on the small cot they provided. Altaf, Erij and I all shared a small room, with our cots arranged along three walls: left, right and opposite the door. Erij was an occasional snorer, but Altaf made no noise at all. Her sleeping was as bland as her face. I suspected that, in spite of her chubbiness, the lack of facial muscle control contributed to her not sawing wood at night.
Nobody cared when you went to sleep, or even to bed, but all the lights except for emergency lights went out at 9:00 pm local time, after the evening salat, and came back on again at 5:00 am, in time for the morning prayers that were called fajr.
We were all required to participate in the five daily prayer times of the salat – and surprisingly, we were required to perform it without clothes, since we were never allowed clothes in the prison. Specifically acceptable clothing choices are outlined in the Koran, but that wasn’t observed here. However, in lieu of clothes, we were required to wrap ourselves in the blanket from our bed to perform salat. If for some reason we were away from our quarters at one of the prayer times, we would place a thin strip of black cloth over our head, which extended down far enough to touch our shoulders on each side. Those strips of cloth were strategically placed for use all over the prison.
After fajr, morning salat, we took turns showering and grooming ourselves in the small bathroom the three of us shared. We did that in order of seniority: Erij, then Altaf, then me. Once Erij had shaved her head and removed any stray eyebrows (all brows were strays by definition), she would go into the shower and wash and shave her body, while Altaf shaved her own head and plucked her brows. We rotated through the process like that with me bringing up the rear.
We were “programmed” by our controllers to start becoming anxious about our need to shave and pluck and trim our nails as soon as we were awakened by lights on. That anxiety built during morning salat, and continued to build for me until Altaf was in the shower and I was removing those awful whiskers from my pretty little head.
Because of what the controller had done to the mind of every inmate in the prison, eyebrows were the worst. If you found one, it creeped you out like having some hideous bug crawling on your face. Showing any white on the tips of your nails was almost as bad from the standpoint of being disgusted. As a result, a high percentage of the inmates took to biting their nails – and their toenails too if they could manage it. I used to bite my nails back in my grade school and middle school years, though I finally broke myself of that habit before high school. As a result, I was determined not to start that habit up again here, so I meticulously trimmed my nails every day, sometimes making them a bit sore in the process. But I resisted biting them.
Shaving my head gave me something approaching a sexual thrill every time. They’d messed with my brain and emotional center very directly in that regard. Running that razor over my head, and feeling the soft smoothness of my scalp as the razor cleaned me up turned me on like a nude pic of the hottest guy or girl possible. More actually. It never lessened and I looked forward to it every morning. I suppose they didn’t permanently remove my hair to force me to shave it – and love and hate that act simultaneously. There were times when I would be both aroused and crying my eyes out at the same time. Such was how they messed with our minds.
Years ago – back in high school - I had laser treatment to permanently remove the hair on my legs, arms, underarms, and pussy, not even leaving a small “landing strip.” So in the shower, I had only to make sure no tiny, blonde hairs, which had persisted after the laser treatments, had reappeared on my upper thighs or arms. When I finally emerged from the shower, with nary a hair on my body save my eyelashes, I actually felt good. Perhaps the best I’d feel all day. And it was that way every day.
Given what the controller had rearranged, disrupted, or taken over within my brain, I suppose every day of the rest of my time in the prison would feel that way, because of the programmed boost I’d get from the imposed obsession with shaving myself. I’d be shackled with those mental bonds for years. I realized that I both hated and looked forward to them exerting their power over me. My controller had bound them up with what little I was able to realize of my female sexuality. I had no erogenous zones anymore. Instead, I had the tantalizing but insufficient boost that shaving, plucking, trimming, caning and smoking gave me.
After my grooming, I had to take breakfast – at least until I achieved the weight they had designated for me, based on my resident group. The others usually went off to jobs of various sorts. I’d be assigned a job when I reached my target level of plump. In the meantime, after breakfast, my job was to clean the rooms that held me, Altaf and Erij. Once every three days, I’d clean the common areas for our resident group of nine.
Breakfast, in those early months, was a high-caloric gruel from the feeding station. I’d sit there, place the tube in my mouth, and press the blue button. The tube’s water wash would shoot into my mouth and be easily swallowed. It would be followed by the fattening, prison porridge which I would try to swallow as rapidly as it came, and then by another water wash. If I got too much in my mouth, couldn’t swallow fast enough, and had to stop the process, I’d press the blue button again and it would halt for one minute. When this happened, the machine would give me about 50 percent more gruel, after it resumed, until it stopped. That would make me gain pounds faster, but it would mess me up for most of the day – from how I felt, to whether or not I could actually poop enough.
So I tried to take it down as it came.
Besides, I’d been told to plump up, and that’s what I had to do. What I wanted – to be my historic slender-yet-curvy, pretty, sexy, long-or-short-haired, highlighted-blonde, all-American girl – had nothing to do with it.
So I woofed it down.
A matron watched over me this whole time, and for at least half an hour afterwards. That happened every day, until I reached their goal. Yeah, there was no resisting whatever they wanted. This was the Control Institution for Delinquent Women, after all. The emphasis was on CONTROL.
After the semi-liquid breakfast, I did my chores. Then, in the later morning or early afternoon, a bell would sound, Altaf and Erij would return from whatever their jobs were, and join me for zuhr, the second prayer of salat.
After zuhr, we would beat each other. This was not only required, but all of us in my resident group needed it at this time. The same kind of anxiety that had plagued me earlier when I had head stubble, affected me at that time, except that it was directed at my need to be beaten.
I am not a pain person. At one time I thought spanking as a part of sex play might be fun, and eventually dabbled in it from time to time. But given a choice, I will avoid pain situations at every opportunity, unless I feel overwhelmed with the need to protect someone – for me, that means a need to protect children. Otherwise, I have no interest in pain.
I should have said that I used to have no interest in pain.
Now I love it. I realized that on the first morning that I was out of the clinic, and in the actual prison. To my altered consciousness, pain arouses me more than anything except the shaving, plucking, and trimming ritual. For me, the delicious, biting pain of flagellation - caning, beating, being lashed and slashed with a switch, whip or stiff branch - is secondary only to the daily, morning ablutions, in the pleasant but inadequate sexual stimulation it imparts to me.
Destiny Taken (Destiny Lost Book 1) Page 19