All I could say to her was, "try not to rub it. There's nothing here for it, honey, it'll get infected…. if not already….. there's no clean source of water….."

She replied, "Dr. Emily, she says that she has stuff." Whispering in conspiratorial fashion, Janine then leaned toward and offered, "I don't think she's a real doctor!"

"Well, honey," I corrected, "she is a doctor. Just a Ph.D. doctor, she has a doctorate." Imagine, having this kind of conversation, in this place.

Janine looked frustrated, "why would they confuse you like that?" Confuse? Why the hell would that be important in a place where we're all slowly dying from radiation poisoning?

At least the Aunts on horses, the ones who beat us until we dropped, at least they had rudimentary anti-radiation measures. (One woman imprisoned here, though, she'd been a technician at an old Pennsylvania nuclear plant. She knew all the safety standards. After one beating she'd got, all she did was smile. She said quietly to me, 'that Aunt, she thinks that HazMat suit will save her! That's the CBRN suit, good for chemical spills, petrochemical fires and the like. Radiation? That bitch is as dead as we are…. ha ha ha ha ha!')

Looking at Janine, I tried to offer a funny quip about her confusion, an old saw we'd recited in med school, "a Ph.D. just means 'piled higher and deeper'."

Instead of giggling, Janine looked a little angry, "well, they shouldn't fool you like that. Dr. Emily says she has an ointment. First it itches, then it hurts!"

I said, "Well, honey, the problem isn't Emily. It was the original oculoplastic surgeon who did this." I paused and tried to view it closer, "did you have a cancer? Glaucoma? An injury? This is not a very clean enucleation."

Janine sat back and transformed into a little girl. Man oh man, even in this place, especially in the Bootheel Colony, she was probably the only one capable of widely varying moods. That was her superpower. Giggling one moment, pouting the next. Everyone else seemed to be in a permanent state of either depression or extended trauma. Janine, she was all over the place.

I got the feeling that of all of us, she just might survive this. If. If the radiation didn't get her first.

"I was bad," she finally said in as timid a voice as I'd heard in a while.

I feared asking her about it. Because, fuck, this was Gilead. What new fresh hell could those people invent? For someone as sweet as crazy-Janine?

I said, "I doubt it was anything you did, honey."

She exclaimed as if informing me of some deep secret, "I called their Red Centre a 'loony bin', right to their face. Aunt Lydia, she then got mad."

Not knowing what to say, I remained silent and Janine continued, "it was my fault. It was also my fault when I'd gone to that Womyn's centre, 'womyn' with a 'y', in the before times, I'd had…" she stopped, looked around, then said, "I had the 'a' thing. So I was punished…."

Oh honey. I said matter of factly, trying not to myself touch her eye-socket, "we had a Womyn's - Womyn's with a 'y' - Health Initiative in Boston. It's what got me here."

Janine leaned forward, returning to her quiet, conspiratorial voice, "wow. You did…. you did, the 'a'-thing."

"They're called abortions, Janine," I said in a plain, audible voice, dangerous for this context. But there, what were they going to do to me?

"They're an essential right for a woman to be able to control her body."

"Well, my sin was a compound one, that's what Aunt Lydia said. I wouldn't have needed the 'a'-word if I had not tempted those five frat guys. I was the sinner with them, that's what Aunt Lydia said. I was to blame - I mean, I'd worn that short skirt."

I felt a rare, and for this place dangerous disgust well up in me. "Whoever this 'Aunt' is of yours, Janine….. let's just say, I'm glad I've met you." Calculating our probable age difference, she was probably a little younger than June, I said, "let me be your 'Aunt'. A little different from that Lydia creep, so you can call me your 'Auntie'."

"Oh, you cannot be that, you're nice!" So I made her repeat 'Auntie' a couple of times.

And re-emphasized, "don't rub that eye." Then again, what good would NOT rubbing it do in the Bootheel Colony?

FIONA AND KIT

I wondered if anyone else called her 'crazy-Janine'?

My guess? Women trapped in this hell, they probably resented her perkiness. Yes, Virginia, 'perkiness' in hell. Who does that?

Janine, she marched to the beat of a different drummer. Even here. You could see it in her - as bad as this place was, she occupied a different reality, she could find moments of happiness no one else saw.

I saw her out in the killing field, we over-turning that shitty and uncooperative soil - it was just as radiated 6 inches down as it was at the top. Yet we spent all day digging it up and flipping it over. As if. Apparently, our 'Aunts' called it the 'Chernobyl fix', whatever that was.

In the midst of all that, who but Janine could find the one, flowering dandelion. Typical Janine. Maybe it was because she was always on the lookout for something like that, unlike the rest of the women.

Like her, it had somehow broken through. She reminded me of my own daughter, June, who used to do that when she was ten. Then when June became a teenager, she seemed to forget all of that child stuff.

Not Janine. There she was blowing on the dandelion, saying to 'Dr.' Emily beside her, "I'm making a wish!" There she was, crazy-Janine making a fucking wish in this place. Emily gathered the strength to curse her out.

Then at that exact time, a woman on the opposite side of the two, she collapsed. Face down, her face pressed into some moist, irradiated soil in her shovel. Upon inspection, she'd not been breathing. Two Aunts on horses came up, threw a body bag down, into which the woman's body was zipped. They saved her shovel, but zipped her up and left the bag for later pick-up.

It lay there until we were finished at the end of the day. Not even the dignity of a simple prayer, not that I believed in that sort of thing. But maybe that woman did? If she did, why not? That would be the decent thing…..

What did Janine say to 'Dr.' Emily?

"I want to change my wish." For the umpteenth time, Emily heeped invective on to her.

Then Fiona and Kit. Kit was not long for this world, she was so far gone that the Aunts didn't bother beating or taising her, when she could not manage getting out of her cot. We were always surprised that when we'd finished our march back from those fields that Kit was still there.

As always, after our day of labour, that was when a woman named Fiona, when Fiona's real work began. Through tears, Fiona would cool Kit's brow. Me being me, I quietly mentioned to Fiona, that she should probably wait until there was a less contaminated water-supply, but all she did was look at me and keep with her tender care.

Then came in Janine holding a bouquet of something-or-other, some bright yellow flowers. My god, where'd she get those!? Had the rest of us simply been looking past them?

Behind her, Janine was pulling the Rabbi. 'Dr.' Emily was in close pursuit, I heard her say, "Jesus, Janine, we're just cows being worked to death - there's you dressing up the slaughterhouse for them!'

Janine ignored Emily, looked at the Rabbi. 'You, you have to marry them. I know you told me that you don't marry two ladies," she said, as Fiona kept going with her gentle care, to Kit's weak smiles. "Look at how much they love each other! Besides, cows don't marry, but Fiona and Kit, they do, if you let them! Look at them, they're in love!'

Look, I've got to say it. 'Marriage' is a hopelessly patriarchal thing, I don't know why people do it other than to conform to what is chaining women. Other than to force us into surrendering our choices.

And this 'equal marriage' thing, that some of my colleagues back in Boston used to crow about…. man oh man, how does adopting a patriarchal institution, but this time for dykes, how does that correct things?

The rabbi, though, she did the ceremony. Right there as Kit was softly bleeding from her lesions. The words sounded like they were in Hebrew. I was positive that the rabbi was the only one in that cow-shed who spoke that language.

The next morning, Kit's body was taken out with her new wife and now widow, Fiona, in tearful tow. I mean, was that all Janine had accomplished, making Fiona a widow?

The same Rabbi, she was now leading the procession, saying what to me were words indistinguishable from the previous evening's 'wedding'. Janine, she was the fucking 'event planner', she was the only one smiling as she told people where they should stand in the procession. She made sure everyone knew where to stand at the graveside, she made sure everyone repeated their small part of the rabbi's litany.

Crazy Janine, overnight instead of sleeping, she had memorized those Hebrew phrases that she did not have a hope of understanding.

Out of everything that was indecent about the Bootheel Colony, fuck me - Kit, she got a decent burial. Complete with a painful mourning.

Janine, she saw to it.

It was not the first time here that I saw a woman having to be held up - Fiona, she was collapsing. But for the first time in forever, it was neither because of the radiation nor the beatings.

For Fiona, she was now, briefly, collapsing not because of a beating, but because of love. The pain of losing her life mate.

Janine, she saw to it.

A THOUSAND MILES AWAY

Unbeknownst to me, my daughter, a thousand miles away, was making this promise:

"You're tough, aren't you? You listen to me, okay? I will not let you grow up in this place. I won't do it. Do you hear me? They.. they do not own you. And they do not own what you will become. You hear me? I'm gonna to get you out of here. I'm going to get us out of here. I promise you. I promise." — But that was for later. At the time, I did not know it. But I was figuring it out.

That would have been the promise I would have made to June if I'd known. Instead, I had arranged Mr. Whitford's vasectomy, confident that his 'payment' to me, would get June and her family out.

THE 'Y' WAS THE CLUE

I remember the dust up we at the Womyn's Health Initiative had had about that 'Y'.

To the radical among us, it was important. We could not be seen as being simply extensions of 'men', and 'women' was the most obvious, most visible manifestation of our chains.

To the pragmatic among us, though, we needed funding, chiefly from the old, now defunct Commonwealth of Massachusetts. State legislators. Men. They did not like funding radical organizations! Radical womyn. Yet what we were doing was not radical, it was basic.

But that's not what occupied me at Bootheel. As I lay on my cot in this god-forsaken, women's killing ground, it hit me. Janine was the one who had quipped, "When I'd gone to that Womyn's centre, 'womyn' with a 'y', in the before times…"

Was Janine from Boston? Was 'Dr.' Emily from there as well? They obviously knew each other….

The next morning, we were separated, we'd gone to the killing fields separately. But that didn't matter, because after our ten hours of labour - assuming we survived the day - I knew that Emily would be in the mint garden, pulling leaves for tea… as well as some other herbs she secretly grew for her little biscuit-tin, medical kit.

As I spied her, I wondered how soon I could realistically dart from our line, I didn't want to draw an Aunt's ire, who would wield a taser to get me back in line. Yet there was that invisible 'medicine line' in which we could break ranks and wander in directions of our choosing, that line when the Aunts didn't seem to care.

Then I saw them. Several black squad cars drew up, covering everything around them in dust, in radioactive debris. Some black-clad men jumped out, and gave our lead-Aunt a list. That Aunt then barked some names, two of which were Janine and 'Dr.' Emily, without the 'Dr.'.

Noooooooo! Not now! The two were among the women loaded into the squad cars, headed for parts unknown. It was unfathomable to think that they were being led to their deaths, I mean, that would happen here soon enough! Is Gilead THAT diabolical?

Me, my heart sank. My plan since last night was to ask them if they were from Boston, and if so, had they ever heard of someone named June Osborne?

Had June and her family got out? Now the black squad cars were disappearing into the dusty distance.

WATER, IT IS EVERYTHING

I just stood there, in the paused line. Hopefully the rabbi was still among is. I was standing there sobbing, not able to force any liquid down my cheeks.

The cleansing water of tears, it was simply too precious. Now that she was gone, I realized I did not, apparently, have Janine's superpower.