Truly Elemental: And Other Retro Faerie Tales

Red Cap

My mother once told her entire suburban book club about how she rubbed my head when I was a baby. "I did it up real nice," she said, winking at me as I stood in the doorway, hugging that shitty white rabbit stuffy. "Boys need their heads shaped by their mommas. They're more likely to go bald when they're older. I did Melvin a grand favor, gave him something right pretty ."

I remember because it was the only thing I could think about the day Mick the Brick took a razor to my head in the yard.

I don't know what my mother imagined for me, but I doubt it included six lacerations across my scalp and a whole lotta thread X to close 'em.

They shaved my hair right off in the Hospital Ward. I couldn't see much else but blood. It ran into my eyes and down my chin (head wounds bleed the most, Momma used to say). And if it wasn't the blood, it was the soap lather that stung.

I cried. A rubric afternoon among many, that's for sure. I didn't care that I cried, though, or that the warden saw fit to put me in solitary. Because we all knew, I was in it deep. Thirty days alone beat one day on the block in my condition.

My condition being terminal, that is.

Mick knew what he was doing when his big boys held me flat on my chest. I ate dirt and near broke my arm twisting against their meat-paws—until he settled his knee between my shoulder blades and sliced my melon up six ways to Sunday. I bit clear through my lip to keep from screaming.

I've got a little hair back now, and a lotta nasty scars. White hash lines and bristles. Raised. Cruel. I mighta been clawed by a mountain lion. Maybe I'll tell that story when I get out, but for now all I see when I look into what's left of my cell mirror is Mick and his razor.

And I know, he'll be coming for my throat next.

It's not something I like thinking about, especially since today was the day they were sending me back to C block. Sending me home.

Every murderer and uptown thug too rancorous for ass backward, small fry type of prisons communed on this nubby little island a mile from The City. Every hall was filled with 'em: A block, B block, C block, D block—even the basement. And Mick the Brick was king over all. Even security turned a blind eye, he had that much power.

I was a dead man on each and every row. And the frigid bay beyond the fences made certain I'd stick around to see my number come up.

The cell door whined on salt-rusted hinges, stretching back as slow and stiff as I felt crouched near the sink. When the light hit me square, I couldn't keep from flinching. My instincts warned me to hide as long as possible.

What was I? A farm boy from Virginia. All I knew was raising corn and teaching dogs to fight, mean. True, I'd won every spelling bee since the first grade—but spitting out "ameliorate" correctly didn't mean jack-squat when you weighed one hundred and fifty pounds dunked. Most of the incarcerated men here had mommas that weighed-in at twice that on race day.

I'd be dead long before I turned twenty. I'd be dead by dinner.

The guard tapped the door with his baton. The sound pinged off the paint chipped walls of solitary and crawled inside my ears. I swallowed, rolling my shoulders to relax the iron bands seizing in my chest. When I caught a half-decent breath, I'd move. Really, I would.

"Light a fire, Malone. Time to play."

Time to play.

Sonofabitch sounded pleased.

Emerging from that tiny box, I was an insect, cracking through an old shell and wrestling free. Bony elbows and a body built for running, I slid from safety and into a set of irons. I had nowhere to run now, not with a pound of metal on my wrists. Every muscle I owned rebelled, circumscribed.