MOVING DAY. I look up at the slate gray sky and blink. Snowflakes spiral down and melt on my cheeks. The sergeant of the Special Housing Unit at Great Meadow steps behind me and whacks his baton across the lower part of my spine. I go down in a heap of rattling chains. The others laugh, glad to finally be rid of me, but they shuffle their feet away from my mouth. I’ve heard the guards say more than once that a human bite is much more unsanitary than even a dog’s.

“So long, asshole,” the sergeant says.

Two guards lift me up by the arms and drag me across the icy pavement into the snowcapped blue van bearing a yellow state seal. My wrists are handcuffed. The lock on the cuffs is covered with a metal black box to prevent me from picking it open. The box has a padlock of its own with a chain that has been wrapped around my waist. My legs are manacled together just above the ankles.

The two guards sit behind me where I can’t see them. A transportation sergeant sits down in the front next to the driver. They can’t chain me to the floor. That would be illegal, and if they roll the van and I die in the burning vehicle, none of them will get their state pensions.

I have been promised a trip straight to the box at wherever it is I’m going, so I don’t plan to cause any trouble. They call me crazy, but I’m not so crazy. Isolation, or Special Housing, does more than keep me from fantasizing about the life I once had. I know from stories what it means to be in a maximum-security prison. In the regular prison population, a man doesn’t stay a man for very long. I’ve been in the system for just over eighteen years and that’s never happened to me.

The snow keeps coming and I doze off. Somewhere in a crazy dream about my dad and Black Turtle and Frank digging up boxes of gold coins in the quarry, I am awakened by the van coming to a stop. I hear the shriek of a huge metal door grinding open, but by the time I come to my senses, we are inside a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Out the other window, a forty-foot concrete wall glows under the halogen lamps mounted on the guard tower. The massive steel door slams shut behind us and the chain-link gates in front of the van creak open to let us out of the holding area.

They shove me outside, into the flood of lights and the cold. A raucous screeching fills the air. Thousands of desperate croaking voices in an ocean of agony. I look up and think for a moment that this is hell. The sky is alive, a pulsating flow of black vermin scurrying across an indigo plain. Crows. Thousands upon thousands of them.

Another cackle attracts my attention. It’s human. A guard in a wool cap with a face of blue razor stubble and an angry yellow smile pokes me in the stomach with his baton.

“Tough guy, huh?” he says.

I let my face go flat and I look into his eyes.

“Ooh, you’re real bad,” he says. “I’m scared.”

Then he cackles again and shoves me toward the entrance to a five-story stone building. Cellblocks with rectangular windows barred by rusty steel.

The stone above and around the entrance is distinct from the building that reaches into the distance on either side. Around the entrance, the rough-cut blocks are tall and narrow with popped-out horizontal stones and narrow portals. This bluntly decorative stonework rises above the roofline of the cellblocks. As I pass under the gothic peak of the door, I am struck by its similarity to the tower of a church.

The guard pushes me into an elevator. Now there are two of them, standing opposite me. Glowering. The bluebearded one slaps his baton against the palm of his hand. Long narrow fingers with pointy nails. The skin pale and the knuckles sprouting dark hair. I know his kind. The kid who got spit on in high school. Now he can push around murderers and thugs, the worst of the worst. Now he’s a badass. That’s what he pretends.

The elevator stops, and I am jabbed in the kidney on my way out. A sergeant looks up from his desk.

“Sit down,” he says, and I sit.

“Welcome to Auburn.”

I gag on my own saliva.

Auburn Prison. Seven miles from the Tudor cottage on Skaneateles Lake. There is a restaurant outside these walls where I used to eat. Balloons, it’s called. Good Italian food in the shadow of the west wall. A point of conversation for diners. Good for a laugh. There is a Dunkin’ Donuts in this town. Veal Francesco at Michael’s Restaurant. Dadabos Pizza. A movie theater. Curley’s, where the guards all drink after work. Places woven into the fabric on the fringes of my old storybook life.

That explains the crows. Hundreds of thousands descend on the tiny city of Auburn each winter. A plague of biblical proportions. Some say the crows are a curse on the forefathers’ greed for choosing to have the state’s first prison in 1812 instead of accepting the offer to become the state’s capital. Some say they are lured by the warmth of a microclimate created by the unique combination of concrete, lights, and the outlet of Owasco Lake.

I suck in air, the precursor to a sob, but I bottle it up. My head begins to throb.

The sergeant looks hard at me.

“Aww,” Bluebeard says, “she’s crying, Sarge. She’s not happy with her new home.”

“You can start over here, White,” the sergeant says, ignoring Bluebeard and the fact that my eyes are now on my shoes. “If you can live by the rules, you’ll be out of SHU in three months. If you fuck up, you’ll stay here. We’ll start you out on the regular food. If you fuck up, you’ll get the loaf. It’s the shittiest-tasting slice of crap ever made, but no one ever died from it. That and water. Fuck up again and, well, sometimes we have trouble with the fuse box for the lights in these cells. You choose…”

A chair scrapes the floor, and the sergeant’s footsteps move toward the door. It closes and I get a whack from Bluebeard across my shoulder blades.

“Up, asshole,” he says.

They put on latex gloves. They strip me down and search my rear. Bluebeard whispers to me, calling me his girl, his razor stubble chafing my ear. My eyes water and I close them tight. This part is worse when you fight it. I know.

They make me shower, then give me a new set of clothes. Forest green.

Bluebeard leads me into the top of D block and the other guard uses his keys to open a box on the wall. Home to five levers. Two of them are covered with a red sleeve that tells the guard they belong to the cells of prisoners without recreation. The other guard pulls down the lever on the end and I hear a cell door begin to hum. I am shoved into a tank, a self-contained unit of five steel cells. My cell door clanks open.

From the darkness beyond the crosshatched steel bars of the cell next to mine appears the pale shape of a face. An old man with tufts of white hair and a hooked nose that he pokes through the bars. Two glowing blue eyes magnified by owlish glasses. Small growths of crud are attached to their whites, encroaching on the irises. He says nothing, but his lower lip disappears behind a crooked row of teeth. It might be a smile. Maybe he’s a bug. A nut. Something about these eyes is very different.

Bluebeard shoves me into my cell. His kick barely grazes my backside, and I don’t bother to even look back at him. I stand over the bowl and relieve myself, then I crawl onto the bunk and curl into a ball, trying hard not to think about how close I am to home.