The Music Box

WARNING ⚠️: Contains mature subject matter!!! Rape, gratuitous violence, and graphic language!!!

The rugged bluff embracing Marquette Prison runs parallel to the tempestuous eyes of Lake superior. The raging caps watch as I disappear up the drive, while the Sugarloaf mountains overshadow the maximum security penitentiary as a feudal lord would over his fiefdom.

   The stormy weather swimming on the horizon hardly offers a good omen to my first day as a clinical psychologist in a penal institution. After graduating from University of Michigan, I completed medical school while the US Army paid off expensive student loans in return for four years in military intelligence. Working specifically in the Psych-ops area, which in cruder terms meant: I taught other soldiers how to mind fuck prisoners of war, Detainees, and terrorists during interrogation.

   Hoping I'm ready for such a drastic change, I come to the top of the road and there in front of me sits the formidable Marquette prison. The prison front is a walled fortress set in gothic inspired architecture, reminding me of a draconian castle as goliath towers rise eighty feet into the air. An eerie morning fog envelopes the prison giving the place a truly impregnable appearance.

   My family believes I'm touched in the head for not only traveling hundreds of miles from home for a job, but one in a correctional facility. In their Republican blinded eyes, it's no place for a woman to work. As if my psychology degree should only be used to dispense anxiety medication to overprivileged wives and daughters of the inherently wealthy. I'm sure me taking this position is quite the scandalous topic amongst their churchgoing friends. My younger sister had been kidnapped and raped at eight years old, leaving me as an overprotected child, and at the time, military life seemed like the only escape from those childhood memories, overbearing parents, and their rigid rules.

   Straightening my skirt while walking across the parking lot, a gust of air from the roaring Superior unleashes it's cold May breath up and around the hem. Taking a deep breath, I push down a lump of uncertainty as my parents voice creep inside my head, and at the same time, I swallow the fear climbing into the pit of my stomach. Not the training videos nor the classes I took after accepting the job, could have prepared me for what is ahead of me or what I would possibly face inside.

   On each end of the building, two identically carved stone gargoyles watch from their perches as if they sensed I didn't belong. Any second, I expected them to shed green moss from weathered bodies and fly off the roost, snatching me away from here. Their claws, although clearly made of stone, appear sharpened a deadly points. When the sun crosses over them, it looks as though blood is dripping off the talons.