Charlene, The Incredible He / She

Disclaimer: The account you’re about to read is purely fictional, made up, pulled from the vacuous spaces of Charlene’s head and told from another vantage point.


Charlene once stated that control center staff had photos of our former school corrections officer entering and exiting a crack-house in Port Huron. Of course, he/she said this after the fact, after his/her one-time working buddy had been fired.

Whether this crack-house story is true (which I doubt since the officer in question was given his job back) leads to one important question: Why is it that management lets Charlene stick his/her nose in places where it doesn’t belong?

Rumors spread like wildfire inside the prison system; all you’ve got to do is strike a match, drop it, and let the flames take-off. After a minor set-back, where Charlene called yours truly, the omniscient narrator, “a fucking idiot,” he/she planted a gossip seed of how I was on the chopping block, inches away from being fired. Of course, in order to go undetected Charlene did his/her planting with a(n) employee(s) from another prison.

“This,” a special education teacher, a young lady and lunch companion of Charlene, informed me, “is my last day at your facility.” Soon, she switched the subject from how she had been told her services were no longer needed to the subsequent, but unsubstantiated, demise of yours truly.

“Interesting,” I responded. “There’s truth to rumors, but I seriously doubt I’m going to get fired any time soon. In fact I just got a high-performance work evaluation.” What I didn’t tell her is that Charlene played a small, intricate role in her fate when she had left a book at our facility a few weeks back. She told me it was a book about relationships, but somehow word got out that it was a book about sex. Ouch! No one’s safe in the company of Charlene.