Ameliorate

Number 29 lies on her bed as the water leaks from the ceiling into her left eye. The old pipe. I need to fix it. But it is really unfixable.
I have to wake 29 and say the usual thing, “That bad at home, ha?”
She doesn’t answer, but I know from the record that it is that bad. 29 has stayed here longer than any other because she can’t go home. At home there are monsters that expect her to do things. So she keeps getting herself locked up again.
Her eyes look to the wet ground as the side of her mouth twitches.
I’ve got to fix the leak. I woke with it pouring in my eyes yesterday. It’s not only the prisoners that pay here, us wardens get the leaks falling on us too, should we try to take a nap.
A little malevolent spirit haunts the prison. It enters the body of those who’ve given up the fight. There’s this, and for many other reasons I have to get 29 out. I have to tell her that the spirit which haunts her died here long ago. 29 thinks that this ghost is a fellow inmate. Dead wrong. Believes too easily. Lets those things that wrong her stay.
I hold 29’s hand. I get her to say those words, “You don’t belong with me,” and I watch the thin sickly spirit loosens the tight clasp on 29’s arm, collapsing in on itself and rotting into the sodden dirty stone.
We move on. I have to get 29 out of this place, but something is making me lose my awareness. It is the continual drips from the roof drowning my stream of consciousness. I’m drifting into sleep. All that keeps me going is the tug of 29’s hand and the shudder of her fear driven screams: “Wake up! Wake up!”
…I would’ve stayed there and died with water rolling down my left cheek had not her slicing scream jolted me again and again to wake and kept me walking until I was out of the maze and in a place where the walls were not so deafeningly high and closed over that only millipedes and silver fish could see a chink of sky.
Where am I now? Not there. Not in that place I thought I had to guard because someone told me it was my job. No, I’m somewhere else, not there.