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moved in. Instead, Crowley knelt on his attacker’s chest, his cast arm wedged into the guy’s neck and his good hand stabbing down as though knocking chips off a block of ice. I steadied the rifle and aimed for a spot on the snow next to Crowley, and everything resolved into a punctuation point.
    I might have fired if not for the man who sprinted across the yard and tackled Crowley. Some civilian. Some weak sister. He appeared out of nowhere and did what no one in uniform had the inclination or the courage to do. Wrestling Crowley down, tying up his good arm from behind, he provided the COs with the excuse or the opportunity to rouse themselves, wade in with fucksticks, and pummel away.
    Two COs dragged Crowley off, not gently. A half dozen more began the sorting-out process now that the event was over. I remained at the railing, staring down, watching the clumsy work going on, mesmerized by the falling snowflakes and the prediction of violence Josh had promised. What the hell had just happened? I’d interpreted the comic book as fantasy and little more, the melodrama of the story salty with the injured sentiments of some self-righteous con. It knocked me off balance to see Crowley attacked so soon after that conversation, as if I’d misheard everything. I thought about the possibilities and got nowhere. Then the hatch at my feet popped up and my replacement arrived a full fifteen minutes early. A short CO with a sleepy look on his face named Patrick Kim emerged from the staircase to join me on the tower. He muttered bitterlyabout the fucking cold and asked me about the excitement. I gave him my abbreviated version and offered a philosophical observation: “Who knew the kids hid shanks in snowballs these days?”
    “Winter sucks,” he said. “Go do your paperwork and get off my tower.”
    After I reached ground level and made my way through the tunnel to Keeper’s Hall, however, I did not pour myself a coffee, find a desk, and get started, but drifted out into the yard to see the site of the happening firsthand.
    The gathering had thinned of inmates and thickened with COs and weak sisters. I saw an assistant warden, a counselor, some medical staff. I did not see Josh; he must have been among the inmates led back to their cells. The sprinter who’d interrupted the fight was still there, a group of COs surrounding him, berating him hard. I knew him by sight as Brother Mike, an ex-missionary turned counselor who ran the art therapy program. I put it all together then. This was the class Josh had spoken about, the program they were all dying to get into.
    Three orderlies and Keeper Wallace squatted before Crowley’s attacker. The man’s face was a mutilated mess, his barrel chest rising and falling in the suck for air. Through an overheard comment I learned that the plucked chicken was Lawrence Elgin, someone I knew to be of the Viking persuasion, which was a general categorization we had for gang-affiliated white supremacists. Looking for some way to make myself useful, I saw that Wobbles, the one-legged inmate Crowley had traded snowballs with, still sat on the groundunattended, his good leg and his peg leg scissored out from his girth. His nose and ears trickled blood, and I wondered if that injury happened when Crowley face scrubbed him. As I walked over, a smile spread across his mouth. “Hey!” he called, and pointed to the red snow between his legs. “Looks like I got my period, doesn’t it?” It was the kind of shot I took all the time, as a woman inside a house for men, so I stopped short and decided to ignore him like everyone else.
    There was nothing for me to do, no reason for me to be there, but still I lingered. I wandered around the site and noticed, in the center of the flattened snow, a toothbrush with flecks of gore and swirls of red around it. Kneeling, I poked it with a finger, delicately tipping it skyward. The bristle end was worn down from normal use, but the handle had been melted and