Prisoner

He couldn’t remember what sunlight looks like. He had stopped counting the days since his incarceration. The birds didn’t even pay him any attention. Darkness does a lot to a man, but when it gets inside a man things change.

Time was no longer an issue for him. He ate when he was hungry, or given food. He slept when he was tired. He was awake when he could stand to be with himself. Most of his day was spent in a stupor of a mixture of denial and self-loathing. He had forgotten most of why he was in here or even who he was before his incarceration. Meals came less and less, it seemed.

He wasn’t always a broken man. The darkness crept in slowly. When he first got in, his optimism was almost too much for the guards to handle. Always asking when he could get out to buy them a drink. He was usually met with a gruff snicker or a sharp jab from a Billy club. His darkness started to sneak in when his lawyers started asking different types of questions. They wanted to know how to disperse his wealth, and what to do about notifying family. He didn’t want to admit defeat; he had to be beaten first.

Nine by seven. He had measured his cell many times by now, too many to keep count of and still consider yourself sane. It always came out to nine feet by seven feet. Sixty-three square feet to call his. He would find himself re-arranging his room, finding a new place for his wireframe bed and thin sheet. Another space was his workout room, pushups and sit-ups along with dips off the bed. Another space was his bathroom, a bucket that was all too often forgotten about. And a final space was his hopeful space. A place where he used to sit and stare at the wall imagining what the sun looked like that day and how the wind was blowing and whether the leaves had changed color yet. That space was getting smaller and smaller.

His lawyers came by once in what seemed like a month, but could have been a week. This meeting was particularly troubling. They wanted to know what style of execution was preferable.

“What do you mean execution?” he asked, troubled.

“Your execution, you were sentenced to that last year, you knew this was coming,” they said with a stern softness.

“Well I was unaware of this and I want to appeal this as high as it can go,” he said, hoping to use what little law jargon he had left at his disposal.”

“There is no appeal, this is the decision.”

He froze on these words. Staring at the table where the meeting was held. Noticing the relative paleness of his skin compared to his lawyers. Imagining how as soon as this meeting is over he will be shackled, darkened goggles placed on his eyes, and headphones blaring ambient noise and rustling. They, on the other hand, would walk right out that door, into the sunlight. Bathed in warmth and the fresh air that is spring, or summer, or whatever season it is. They got to leave.

The man walking him back to his cell always seemed like a caring person. The man was guiding a blind, mute, and deaf man back to his eventual deathbed. He never decided it necessary to add insult to injury, walking him into a wall or pushing him back to his bed. Always leaving him in the same condition that the man found him in, broken.

The thought of dying had run through his mind many times before. Strangling himself by tying his sheet from one bed leg to another and sitting there, waiting for the oxygen to leave his brain and eventually shut down his organs. Then maybe he would see light.

He woke to the sound of tapping. It sounded like it was coming from outside. He tapped back, hoping to hear it again, but it was lost. But then, another sound like the crackle of a firework appeared from what sounded like under his bed. He lifted the sheets and eventually flipped the bed hoping to see a hole to freedom, but nothing was there. Then he heard a voice. Come with me it said, come and be free. It was again under the concrete under the bed. He thought he was losing his mind, hoping the darkness hadn’t finally taken over.

He waited what seemed like days, not sleeping or eating, just listening intently for another voice or sound. He started to drift into unconsciousness when another tap jolted him back to life. This time it was from the doorway to his cell. He tapped back, knowing this isn’t a place where people usually wander around. The door slowly opened. A man dressed in black wielding a Billy club met him. “We need to go,” the guard said roughly. He stood up, brushed off the dust from the concrete floor he was laying on and walked out cautiously. Seeing the corridor he was held in for the first time in what was most likely years was troubling. Leaking walls, rows of what seemed to be endless other closed doors. How can there be this many cells, but he never heard another sound. The guard walked briskly but always kept on eye on him, sometimes motioning for him to hurry, other times stopping for him to catch up. “It’s time to go,” the guard said.

He was ecstatic at this sentence. Time to go, his appeals worked, and his lawyers finally got him off. Or was it this guard, acting as a rogue agent, rebelling against this obviously corrupt system. They approached a small door in the floor. The guard motioned for him to get in. He heard other footsteps and assumed that it was a hiding place for him, the escapee. He went down without question and sealed the door behind him. A bright light turned on. Mirrored windows surrounded the white floor and ceiling of what seemed to be a room the same size as his old cell. His retinas retreated as if they had just been scared to death by the sight of any light this bright. He hadn’t even gotten adjusted to the light when he heard a tapping from one of the windows. He rushed to that side of the room and tapped back. “Hello,” he said, hopeful someone would answer. He started to feel dizzy, the windows seemed to spin like a carousel. He lost his bearing and fell to the floor. He saw a colored gas pouring in from one of the vents in the ceiling. The lights in the room seemed to dim, he could do nothing, frozen. Then he saw a great light.