Novel PT 3- Near End

NEAR THE END OF THE STORY...STORY LINE? About 6 Years after EXCERPT posted Before THIS ONE.


The back of his tool shed was met with wary eyes, and I didn’t want to recognize it under the sunrise of the prison yard. Morning was religiously quiet and the light that spoke of our incriminating weakness was in the eastern horizon with the palest of white rising under midnight and the glowing moon, the star light. It was dark when we breakfasted because night had yet to pass, and my appreciation for all that was could be admired with the others.

No numbers were called in the morning, and no headcount was made. This kept everyone feeling free. It was hard to feel that in a place where cold steel fenced you in. If you step away from the yellow line you walk on at all times, the condemning shot of a rifle will remind you of the guards on high fence posts watching.

It was real, they had to let us know with a pointed gun in the four corners of the barbed wire box. The trees were spray painted yellow to help aim in case of riot, and it reminds us that we were to walk and act according to an officer's mood swing.

Swine flu passed, and I let that go as I walk to the laundry room and get my daily set of whites. Whites were to be tucked into your pants which let the other prison satellites know we were from another unit. They said it was because we were specially assigned and it was a medical aided facility. I think about this and know I won’t have a seizure if I know I won’t have one.
Possibility dies in the brain, but that was later found in Hitler’s Meine Kamfe.

Apparent to me, this leader of leaders was female and human, and in every aspect she displays it. Her hateful reproach catches me in the shameful and tired defeat of the afternoon, when I am tired she will attack and it was a tiresome ache to know she was right. The painful shame I should feel. 


I remember speaking with Shane when innocent and years were not yet told. I was an eleven year old, staring into the sky and with a joy that needed no hope because it knew no sorrow.
He told me he would give me a star. That I was promised one star, closest to his he’d say.

I want the north star, I would say and smile at the moon beside it.  He kept saying I couldn’t have it because it was taken.

By Whom? I’d ask, wondering of it in the mindless skies.

He'd go ask his mother. I don’t remember, but I met her once at a family get together. 

Mom who is it? What’s the name of that chick who is…

I hear his mother speak to him as I wait on the other half of the phone. To his question there is a brief response, and Shane shines through the receiver.

Brandy. That’s Brandy’s star. And…Never mind, my star is over there where those lights are. You see them over in Steeplechase? You can over here in Churchill.
I could almost taste the air and feel the grass of my old home, but halt. The Guard begins her yelling drill.

I wake up from that memory, vivid like film on blind eyes. I look to the moon and stars, and a quiet sense of godless emptiness fills my heart and head. The weight of it all is burdened within my deep chest and I carry it with a light headed, despondent denial. To replace that empty affection with a new one would make Brandy the sun as well, to which I envied and grew paler with the moon over my head. Sometimes I still feel that way, without even a hum or echo, as I sit inside a house and reflect.
On my way to breakfast, I walk thoughtlessly and appreciate the dark shadows in the morning grass. I could not see the hooking barbed wire or the security marksman in post outside. The light of the kitchen and the smell of baking bread gives me a reason to look beyond the sky and back to my place.
Apprehensive and sometimes outpacing others in the line, walking in beat with the inmates in drilled precision, I let the idle and amusing thoughts die. The guard glowers and draws closer as we approach the whistling kitchen.

Under a black starlit canvas and the linear pale break of the dawning horizon, the fresh thought of freedom is placed on hills outside the fence post.
The countryside was broken and jagged, rising high into cliffs of dirt and cactus, begging to be enjoyed. The fenced yard closes in and the gunmen guard this freedom, so I knew sadness.
The female officer approaches me with a drill yell that is an awful pitchy scream. I think of her husband and imagine her life at home, as I step out of the inmate line. It was her usual way to be cruel, knowing there was no help for me as there was none for any. The other inmates are cold and walk past me, heads down and ashamed. I keep my chin up the way Matt reminded me, and remember the sad smile he gave before I arrived here, his glossy eyes warning me to be strong.

Other mornings I could walk without disturbance to the lunchroom. I’d think of the night and love on those mornings. Coffee was well with the latter, and about our menu there was some concurring joke between sex and food. I was hungry but only because I was without friends and couldn’t blindly negotiate a commissary pass from the scorn of my peer group.

Matt was there, I like to remember, walking beside me on days as I struggled to breakfast and kept the will to live. I drew from that a silent reverence of nature and at dark shadows hiding within the bristling trees, discovering my own mute and dismissive wonder at the maker of sky.

From the prison, my voice had the echo of someone else. It was a fabrication, false and empty. My thoughts became solitary and foreign, telling my original nature to dismiss the idea of love and light, to cover even my shadow with a self proclaimed shame to overshadow my denunciation. The strength of Matthew’s memory was just as quickly dismissed and twice the more a shame, as I step into the lunchroom.