The Toe Tag Society

The ride on the gray goose was short, perhaps less than an hour. It was long enough for your heart to set up a pounding rhythm against your rib cage, causing your breath to come in short, thudding gasps and your ear drums to hurt. It didn't get any better on arrival as we were herded off the bus like cattle, with the new set of guards shouting, threatening, and barking orders. The only thing missing was the electric prod. They didn't seem any happier to see us than we were to see them. After some preliminary bullying and yelling, they herded us, about fifty strong, into a cell built for about thirty. We were ordered to strip and hand out our clothes, including skivvies, through the bars, which was not easy considering that we were literally back-to-back and belly to belly. They passed out some paper tags, the kind you would use to label a piece of meat at the butcher shop, complete with string, which they had gotten from the prison morgue. It was a toe tag, just like the ones you see on TV. One pencil, the kind used at a golf course, was passed around so we could write our name on our tag. That way when, not if, we died, the tag would be attached to our big toe, and our next of kin could be notified. We stood there at attention, buck naked, and waited for our turn with the pencil. It was summertime and hot, so it stunk like the inside of a sewer in that cell. The prison was in the desert, and none of us had had a shower for a couple of days. The smell was enough to make your eyes water and the snot run. This was when the real fear set in. Those of us with knowledge of history recalled a certain ethnic group across the pond during a famous world war being treated this way. Deep down you knew that we were not going to be gassed, but about now your mind started to play tricks on you. Finally, they started to hand out prison jumpsuits by throwing them in your face and telling us to get dressed. This was a trick, considering we were still jammed in this one cell, and we tried not to become intimate with anyone. There didn't seem to be any consideration of size, and some swapping did help a bit. However, there was no gas coming out of the ceiling. Your heart slowed down a bit, and you slowly started to regain a semblance of normal breathing. Welcome to the Big House.