Struggle On Home

Chapter Four

2003

K.C. didn't often like to think about the five years he'd spent in prison. Whenever people at job interviews glanced up to ask why there was a sizable gap between "cashier at Fry's Dry Goods" and "currently attending a part-time course in computer repair at Pathways Community College", he would mumble some bullshit about helping out his parents around the house. That was lie; he hadn't seen his parents in six years.

He'd been rotting in prison alongside Abel, and now Abel was gone.

The wind outside whistled past the battered little room where he lay, sleepless and exhausted. The springs in the mattress creaked when he breathed; he could feel their rusted coils pressing up against his back. The girl sleeping next to him had taken most of the frayed blanket. He didn't feel like he deserved one, anyway. It was nine o'clock in the morning and the sun had been up since half-five, but it was a Sunday. Sunday was the girl's sleep-in day.

There was a crack in the ceiling which hosted a family of spiders. Once, this would have made him queasy; nowadays, he was immune to such trivialities. The spiders' leggy dances across the paintwork were engaging, and sometimes he liked to watch them spin their webs. He admired their patience in waiting for flies; a veteran of food stamp queues, he knew what it was like the have to wait on an empty stomach.

The body lying next to him didn't interest him. Sure, when she'd peeled off her shirt the night before, his pulse had kicked up a few notches, but it'd been almost impossible to get hard and he hadn't been able to do the act without a little imagination. It'd been okay, though. Sometimes he wasn't able to get it up at all. He'd think about what he wanted, start up a nice buzz, and then she'd push herself onto him and it'd all go to hell.

He wriggled on the mattress, trying to find the slack valley which hung between two rows of springs. The movement opened up a scab on his back, coaxed out a thin stream of blood.

"Well, shit," K.C. mumbled. He rolled onto his belly to stop it from drying onto the sheets and slid a hand underneath the pillow.

When he closed his eyes, images and vignettes from Fieldborough crowded silently in. They came in fragments, piece by piece, and he strung them together like beads until he went back into the shrieking and the dark.

--

1998

Every morning at six, Correctional Officer (C.O. for short) Collner would saunter along the tiers, banging on cell doors as he passed them by.

"Everybody get outta bed! Time for a head count!"

K.C. would rise first, having been awake since five, and shake Abel to rouse him. Yawning and bandy-legged, they would slouch in front of the cell window long enough for Collner to check that neither of them had run away during the night. Then they would flop back onto their vinyl mattresses for a couple of hours before breakfast.

They were let out of their cells to get their food-gelatinous lumps of scrambled eggs and sooty squares of dry toast, watery milk for drinking-but they had to return to them to eat. They traded the utensils afterwards for an hour's excercise in the yard adjoining the Fish Tank.

K.C. and Abel both learned to love those scant few minutes in the yard, even though the wind blew gritty black dust into their eyes, even though there was nothing to do apart from pace the dirt. The rest of the day numbed the mind with its length; boredom was not something either of them were used to. K.C.'s manic fidgeting, once a manageable affliction, became as irritating as a bevy of flies in the confines of Cell 109.

The prison didn't have that many windows. Without its flourescent lights, it would have been as dark as a cave. No matter what time of day it was, K.C. could never shake the sense that they were living through a perpetual twilight.