Aymara Cordero

My youngest thinks the world is just this: dusty courtyards, women shouting from cell to cell, and the clatter of plastic cups against iron bars. He plays with broken toys, draws with chalk on the concrete floor. To him, this place is normal. He doesn’t know that this is not how children are supposed to grow up. But I do.

He’s five. I’m forty-one. In eleven months, he’ll have to leave the prison and go to my cousin’s house in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. She’s a good woman, but she has four kids of her own. I don’t know how she’ll manage. I don’t know how he’ll sleep without me. And I don’t know how I’ll go on without him.

I have three other children out there. I haven’t hugged them in over three years. Sometimes they send letters with little drawings or photos. Sometimes they don’t. I don’t blame them. After my husband was killed in front of them, everything shattered. The police arrived minutes later, as if they’d been waiting. I didn’t even get to hold my children. They just shoved me into a van and brought me here. No trial. No lawyer. Just the slow, dirty waiting.

Palmasola is a city with no laws. We make our own rules. If you’ve got money, you get a mattress, maybe a fan. If you don’t, like me, you sleep on a rag and hope you’re not next to someone desperate enough to stab you for a cigarette. They call this place the “university of crime.” They’re not wrong. You come in broken and come out sharper, meaner, colder.

The church helps where it can. The kindergarten run by the sisters is the only place my boy can play safely. Sometimes, when I watch him through the bars, I pretend we’re just poor, not imprisoned. That he’s just at daycare and I’ll pick him up soon. That’s my trick, my way to stay sane.

When he leaves, I will break, I know it. But I’ll try not to show it. I’ll keep learning sewing in the workshops. I’ll write to my children every week, even if they don’t answer. I’ll survive. Because I want to walk free again and be their mother—not this ghost they barely remember.