The tour guide showed us a door marked "Retention Center." Both of us thought it must be something horribe, a pc way of saying Solitary or Electroshock. We all went it. Turns out it was the rec room, and as we walked around I realized I'd been there before, though I didn't let on. Through the glass wall I saw an enforced game of soccer, maybe, on the back field. Half the guys had big red helmets on, bulky, like lego astronauts. I asked why and was told they contained alarms that would go off if those prisoners strayed outside the bounds. I wondered why they didn't just build a fence.
We rounded the corner, past the snack bar (was it fair they were charging prisoners $6 for a hot dog? it wasn't like they had much consumer leverage.) into the bar filled with chatty women. The bar rotated and had one balloon tied to it, which bothered me. That damn blue balloon kept swinging round to the front, over and over.
I was in a dress. I realized I was the best man. All right. So I went for a walk. There was a dime on the ground and I picked it up and gave it to edebroux. She laughed and found a nickel and gave it to me. I didn't say anything, but I felt a bit cheated. But from then on we only found coins of the same denomination to give each other. Seems like every time a coin left my hand, there was another on the ground. The kids caught on and gathered around greedily, scrabling for change. I went for another walk.
I balanced on the brick edge of the fountain in the back garden. Those damn chatty women were everywhere. I overheard a woman making up twangy country-music songs for her mortified daughter, singing at top pitch about how messy and painful her birth had been.
I headed back towards the building but ended up with my friends on a round platform. We lay on the warm stone and talked. We had to get right back up though because we were in the way of the camera shoot, the bride needed to pose. We really needn't have moved, she levitated 20 feet in the air and hung there with her arms and legs like Jesus on the cross for a minute, which everyone thought was cute. The pose she settled on was eyes cast demurely downward, hands clasped delicately around the bouquet, legs wide open. Her veil was maybe 20 feet long and her train must have been 50, white satin rippling down to pool below her on the ground. Her dress, though, was bright red, and the skirt was more like a strip of cloth around her waist, i.e., the whole world and the photographer were looking directly at her vagina. It wasn't much of a vagina. She was beautiful, with polished dark skin and a perfect figure, but her limbs moved oddly, and her vagina didn't seem to, er, open at all. Like Barbie's hard plastic seamless crotch. Still, none of us were glad she was waving it around.
It was time to hurry. I hurried. We all crossed the grass, looking back to see the bride descend gracefully and give her father an open-mouth kiss. The groom didn't mind, he was sullen all the time. His white pants were cutaway, theater-style, for quick removal. From behind, I could see his shorts and his dark hairy legs. I went with the rest of the guys to the bathroom, on the way realizing I had a blue garter belt in my suit pocket. This made me very happy. I perched on the edge of the tub and watched the boys work.