Mama’s wishes were for her to see me settled in a good job and with a good girl. Well, if everything goes according to plan, the second part of her wishes will come into fruition just like the first part already has. Being a warden in a female maximum security prison might not be exactly small talk material, but it pays surprisingly well and offers dental.

The nagging suspicion that Mama’s definition of a good job is vastly different from mine is not enough to make me love my dream job any less. And what a dream job that is! Most convicts here are misunderstood, beautiful, passionate ladies of all ages, whose only crime was to give birth to art for which the society is not quite ready yet. Intricate disembowelments, severed heads repurposed as a flower vase, musical compositions written on instruments made from thigh bones that would make even Lin Manuel Miranda cry from artistic envy. The compositions would, not the thigh bones. Art is useless and meaningless without witness and someone to appreciate it. And the art of those so-called “cold blooded animals” or “menaces to humankind” might not yet be cherished by the uneducated and uncultured celery stalk-brained members of society, but they are revered by me.

So maybe now you get why this is my dream job. Every morning I get to stand guard (but never peek, I’m a gentleman not a common creep) while the serial artists, as I call them, gracefully relieve themselves in the small metal toilet bowls of their cells, and I then walk them around the courtyard for their morning exercise. But none of those ladies has captured my heart, my body, my entire reason for being more than she. Convict 140220. Even her convict ID number Is proof that we are meant to be, because that’s my exact birth date.

The Valentine’s Day Lioness: the elusive, mystery genius, the Grand Master of serial artists. She started off as a child prodigy and remained wild and free for thirty whole years before she was put into captivity. Always hunting on Valentine’s Day, and always depositing her tenderly murdered muses into a lions’ cage in a zoo somewhere in the world, earning her moniker, notoriety and a dedicated group of admirers such as myself.

She was sadly captured four years ago, in my second year here as a warden, when a banana peel discarded by one of the zoo’s monkeys made her concuss her way into her cell and into my heart.

I am fully aware of what most would say upon hearing of my love for her – twenty years is too big of an age gap. But if President Macron made it work, then so can we. And I’m betting that France’s first lady never painted a work on a pride of lions worth of fur, protesting the carbon emissions of a politician’s private jet by using that same politician’s blood and bowel contents as paint.
So, you can imagine how elated I was when I was assigned to 140220’s ward. How I live and breathe for each one of her ‘Warden, we need toilet paper’, and ‘Warden, come, my cellmate just stabbed the cafeteria lady with the tea bag.’

That’s why now I I find myself with hands that are shaking, palms that are clammy, as I hold the Valentine’s Day card – my first ever – that I made for her, using red dye to paint an anatomically accurate heart which I know she will appreciate.

And I hope she will also appreciate the message it took me a week to write, a message that is etched on my anatomically accurate heart:

“Be my Valentine’s Day lioness. Because you know you can relion me.”