David wasn’t paying attention to what happened around him.  Everything had changed so fast…

 

His eyes didn’t look up as they slapped handcuffs around his wrists, nor did he fight as they dragged him away.  He didn’t struggle at all as they pushed him out the door.  In truth, David wasn’t aware of any of it; the night had turned so painfully surreal.

​

He didn’t regain his senses until he was riding on the bus; the rocking motion from speeding over uneven roads jarred him back to the present.  The World seemed distant, but it came back into focus as the landscape grew more remote.

 

In another context, the change would’ve been warm, almost soothing.  The city’s office towers became apartments and apartment buildings became homes; slowly, the homes gave way to farm houses and barns nestled in the wide green fields.  Horses ran off as the bus rumbled by, their muscles thick and knotted underneath dark-brown flesh.

 

Somewhere between the peaceful farms and the bus’s destination, the landscape lost its warmth.

 

The grass became short and brown, the farms fewer.  The sky was bright blue, but seemed vast and empty now.  Everything he saw was barren.

 

Then it appeared on the horizon.

 

Was it light grey in color, or had the white walls been stained by dirt and grime?  David couldn’t really tell which for sure.  In any case, the building was low and wide.  In the city, it would have been overshadowed by modest apartments.  Out here it loomed over everything.

 

The bus slowed as it reached the outermost gate.  The sign beside the road read in plain, simple letters, ‘Clark County Correctional Facility.’

 

The bus drove in through the chainmesh gates, and a shadow fell over them.  David heard some of the others start to pray, but he didn’t bother.  He’d never believed in a higher power.  Looking at the thick concrete walls in front of him, David knew he was on his own.

 

The bus lurched as the old diesel engine strained to carry them towards a long chain-link tunnel.  All at once, the words “thirty years to life” came into focus.

 

That night, he resisted the urge to cry, even as others couldn’t.  He’d been given his own cell in the middle of a long hallway, its walls white with red trim.  The steel door that sealed him inside was the same crimson color.  His only view outside was a six-inch window, though there wasn’t anything there he cared to look at.

 

The only time he saw other prisoners was when he was in the mess hall, and David kept to himself.  A group of men at the next table spent most of their meals laughing, which David found strange.  How could anyone laugh in here?  All he could think of was how many nights he would spend locked inside these walls.

 

Twice a week, he was allowed into the prison yard.  Despite being outside, the high barbed wire fences and looming guard towers squeezed in on all sides, making it hard to breathe.  Some of the other guys played cards, while others stood in loose circles and gossiped about their fellow inmates.  David avoided both.

 

He spent the long days by himself, thinking back to his former life.  He thought of all the little things he’d taken for granted.  Some nights after work, he’d walk to the grocery store to buy a bottle of wine.  Other times, he’d grab some fast food and stream a movie.  Those were the things he missed the most, those little urges that had turned into an itch he couldn’t scratch.

 

The one thing David never thought about was her.

​

*     *     *

 

The first month dragged on for years.  Day-in and day-out, he grew accustomed to the routine.  He hardly saw the sun as his days became defined by when the lights were turned on and off.

 

It took three weeks to get hold of books from the prison library.  It was the first feeling of release he’d felt since coming here.  Pulling open the pages, he could turn his mind to something outside the cold, concrete walls.

 

At lights out, the hardness of his world snapped back.  The joy in those stories made the nights that much worse.  It was only when he had a book to read that he cried at night.  That was how it went for David, every night for the rest of his first month on the inside. 

 

*     *     *

 

When the Judge asked for David’s plea, he stood up from his chair and said, “Guilty.”  His lawyer frowned; he’d assured David that they could get him off.

 

“A clear cut case of temporary insanity,” he’d said.  Now, the attorney squirmed at the sound of the word from his client’s lips.

 

They’d spent hours going over David’s options.  Finally, he’d decided to plead guilty and get it over with.  He’d done it; everyone knew that.  If he fought the charge and won, they’d hate him more than they already did; the taint of that night would follow him forever.  If he plead guilty, at least, there was a sense that he was owning up to what he’d done.

 

Wasn’t that what you were supported to do?  Take responsibility for the things you did?

 

David took the plea bargain, admitting to Murder in the Second Degree of Rebecca Farmer, though he’d always known her as Becky.  When asked to explain himself, David was at a loss for words.  Before sentencing, the judge asked if he was willing to explain himself.

 

It came slowly, the description of what he had done.  I got angry, he said, carried away.  The heat of the moment had….

 

In exchange for his plea, David would get to live for however many years his body would give him.  Life in prison was still a life, even if it was behind bars, but even that made him feel guilty.  It was more than what Becky got.

​

The Judge called him all manner of names, violent, stupid, and methodically cruel.  David listened and found himself pondering the contradiction: was it possible to be both stupid and methodical?  It didn’t seem so to him, but he resisted the urge to point that out.  The man in the chair in front of him literally held David’s life in his hands.

 

When the sentence came down, the words echoed in the high corners of the courtroom, but they seemed empty and hollow.  He was pushed away by a pair of police officers and it was then that the world had lost focus.  Thinking back, he couldn’t remember the hours between the court and this place.  Somehow, he’d managed to forget his last few moments of freedom, if that was what they were.

 

*     *     *

 

One year in, David finally opened up to some of the other guys.  Mostly, he played cards with Mitch and Kodak.  Mitch had raped a girl down in Pepper Pike, before leaving her for dead in a ditch.  When a local hunter found her, she was almost gone; seven years later, she still couldn’t raise her left arm above her shoulder.  Despite all that, she sent Mitch a letter every week.  He’d spend two or three days writing his reply.

 

Mitch seemed like a good guy, but David never asked about the girl or the letters.

​

David’s other friend was called Kodak.  David never asked why.  It didn’t matter what he’d been called before, Kodak was his name now.  Anyway, David wasn’t sure he’d like the answer if he’d asked.

​

Kodak had been inside for over a decade, but he still knew how to tell a joke.  One of those had been the first thing to make David laugh, the first time he’d laughed in thirteen months.  They’d quickly become friends.

​

Like David, Kodak loved books.  They exchanged their favorites as they walked along the edge of the dingy fence in the yard.  Kodak like dramas while David preferred mysteries.  At first, David had balked at Kodak’s choices, but after reading a few, he couldn’t deny that the big guy had a point.  So they spent their afternoons discussing Agatha Christie and Jane Austen, Connelly and Radcliffe.

 

David had never smoked on the outside, but he’d picked it up on the inside.  There wasn’t much else to break up the day, and a smoke was a good way to start a conversation.  And sometimes, the cigarettes were just a nice change of pace.

 

In the movies, cigs were traded like currency, but that never happened in here.  Some guys traded ramen noodles, but he never bothered.  The only thing he really cared about were books, and those were free.

 

Even though he’d been here more than a year, he still thought a lot about his old life.  Sometimes, he still cried at night.  It was lonely inside.  If he died tomorrow, he wondered if anyone would care at all.  Once upon a time, he’d had friends, family, coworkers.  He’d always bee close to his sister Liz, and she was the only one who’d come to visit him.

 

When she arrived, Liz brought a picture of her son Josh.  David’s nephew was in the fifth grade and played shortstop at school.  David looked at the picture through the glass.  More than any other time, he wished he could take back what he’d done.

 

Liz asked him what he’d been up to, and he mumbled something about the books, about Kodak and Mitch.  Pretty soon he ran out of things to talk about.  There wasn’t much in here, and that was by design.  He wanted to hear more about her.

 

Liz talked about work, about friends.  She talked about Josh.

 

When David asked about her husband, Brad, she went quiet.  Her eyes teared up and there was a long moment when neither of them spoke a word.  The prick had moved out two months ago.  The divorce wasn’t final yet, but the papers were all drawn up.

 

Liz blamed herself, not just for how things had ended, but for wanting to take the bastard back.  She was lonely.  She missed having him in her bed, even if they hardly ever did anything more than sleep; she missed his warmth beside her.

 

It had been more than a year since David had touched anyone except when he was being searched by a guard or put into cuffs, but he held his tongue.  Instead, he tried to reassure Liz that it would all work out.

​

“You’re fuckin’ amazing, Sis.  You’ll find someone in no time.”

 

Before he could say anything else, a guard came by and told him his time was up.

 

Sis forced a smile, “I’ll come by next week.”

 

David smiled and waved as she turned away.   They took him back to his cell.  Within a few minutes, the lights were out for the night.  The darkness came, and the last person David cared to talk to was himself.

 

Unlike everyone else, he could see the monster who lived beneath the quiet façade.

 

*     *     *

 

They’d been friends for five years when Kodak made parole.  They didn’t say anything, just a silent nod and a firm handshake.  Even if there’d been time to do something more, they wouldn’t.  That was the way it went: old guys left and new people came, but it was always the same inside.

 

One day, David had a friend, a brother—in—arms; today, he walked by the edge of the fence by himself.  Through two layers of steel-wire diamonds, he could see the vast emptiness he’d driven through to come here.  Back then, the barrenness of it had depressed him.  These days, it looked wide and open and free.  He’d close his eyes and imagine himself standing out in the middle of it, cracked clay beneath him as he fell to his knees, crying with joy.

 

The thought brought a smile to David’s face.  David dreamed of the stars.  In his mind, they twinkled overhead like a hundred-thousand Christmas lights glimmering across the sky.

 

He hadn’t seen the stars in more than five years; he was locked inside at night.

 

Every time someone he knew left, the prison felt a little smaller.  The new guys came in, younger, leaner, harder.  Mitch had disappeared more than a year ago.  For David, the world kept getting smaller.

 

Some of the other guys weren’t bad, but they weren’t people he could ever call his friends.  Too many were stupid and mean; he couldn’t relate to that.

 

Sometimes, when he was lying in bed at night, David thought about his sister Liz.  She’d visited him plenty in the first couple years.  These days…he hadn’t seen her in over a year.  David couldn’t blame her; she had a job, a son to raise.  What did he have to offer?

 

When she looked at him the last time, he couldn’t tell if it was pity or disgust he saw in her eyes.  He hoped it wasn’t pity.  It was easier to be hated than forgotten.

 

*     *     *

 

A couple weeks after Kodak left, David came across a sketchbook with a pile of paperbacks in the library.  He asked if he could take it back to his cell with a soft pencil, and was happily surprised when he was told that he could.

 

Once upon a time, he’d been a fair student in art class.  High school felt like another life, now, but his hands could still make the soft, delicate curves as they slid the pencil across the rough surface of the paper.

 

At first, he was only able to draw things that he was looking at: a guard’s face, his cell block, guys standing at the end of the yard.  A single drawing took hours to finish, but he didn’t mind.  He had nothing but time.  For hours, he’d barely move a muscle for fear that shifting his body would pull him from his trance.

 

Months later, he was drawing scenes from the books he read and leaving the drawings in the pages when they went back to the library.  It didn’t take long for some of the guards to take notice.  In return for a few new books and some larger paper, he drew portraits of the guys working third shift.  No one said a word to the day guards, who were stricter about things like that, though he was sure they knew more than they let on.  The extra supplies had to come from somewhere.

 

*     *     *

​

David no longer longed for the outside.

 

It had taken twenty years, but he felt comfortable here now.  He was forty-nine, and he had as many grey hairs as brown ones.  Other guys looked up to him; he was one of the old-timers.  There’d been a time when his penchant for silence had gotten him called names: pussy, freak, coward…  These days, it made them respect him.  Whenever he did speak, he didn’t have to shout to make himself heard.  They listened.

 

He no longer got hungry at odd moments.  Two decades of routine had trained his stomach to know when lunch was coming.  The walls of his cell were covered in art, sketches in charcoal and chalk, paintings in oil.  The warden stopped by sometimes to see what he was working on.  Prisoners weren’t allowed to have hard objects in their cells; pens, paperclips, they were all banned.  But David had a paint brush and several bottles of acrylics.

 

One of the guards had asked to borrow one of his drawings, and a few weeks later brought David a clipping of the local town newspaper.  They’d printed a copy of it beside a story about the prison.  David smiled when he saw his own name printed on the bottom.

 

Regardless of all that, his lights still turned off at the same time every night.

 

*     *     *

​

The last time he’d passed through the outer fence had been thirty years, ten months, and four weeks ago, at least that’s what it said on his release.  David hadn’t really been keeping track.  He could faintly remember riding in on an old bus.  Looking around, he wondered if this wasn’t the same one that had brought him in.

 

The official documents told him he’d been paroled.  As quick as that, it was over.  He’d dreamed of leaving for so many years, but that was a long time ago.  Now, he wasn’t sure how he felt.  It was different.

​

He’d lived longer on the inside than he had out of it.

 

When he’d called Liz, she’d agreed to pick him up.  Now, he looked out the stained windows and smiled when he saw her.  She had deep lines running down her face, and her hair was thinner than he remembered.  She had a man standing next to her.

 

“This is Joshua,” she said, nodding at the man.

 

David nodded and tried to smile, but it felt forced.  The young man offered a wan smile in return.  Together, they walked back towards the car.  They drove to her home in silence.

 

They led him upstairs, to Joshua’s old room.  It was empty now, with a thick layer of dust.  A pair of children were playing in the living room, and Joshua introduced them as his children.

​

“This is your Great Uncle Dave,” he said to the girls.

 

David didn’t feel very "great," but then he’d never been one for titles.

 

Going upstairs, David hung a few of his drawings on the wall.  His great nieces watched while their father stood between them.  His hands never left their shoulders, and his eyes lingered on the back of the old man.

 

The first few days were difficult.  David tried to grow accustomed to freedom, but it was hard to do.  He was so used to knowing what every minute ought to be, the openness of the outside was overwhelming.  Liz took him shopping at the grocery store, but he quickly left to go stand outside.  There was just too much going on in there.

 

In the weeks that followed, he sat at the empty desk in his room and thought.  He stared at the empty wall, or out the window.  He knew his sister worried, he could hear her talking to Joshua on the phone when she thought he was asleep.  It didn’t bother him.  He could hardly blame her; she had a stranger living in her home.

​

Every day, he started to write.  However, he never got very far.  Usually it only took him a few words to get fed up, crumping to paper into a ball.

 

It took him three weeks and seventy-six sheets of paper to write his letter.  Once it was done, he read it over.  Of course, it was perfect.  He’d been writing it in his head for twenty years; he could have read it out loud with his eyes closed.  But now that he had it down, there was nothing left to do but…

 

He went downstairs and opened up the phone book.  It only took him a few minutes to find the address.  The name was right there on the page: William Farmer.

​

Liz had told him a couple years ago that the kid had never left town.  Why would he?  He couldn’t possibly remember, could he?  Still, that had spooked David out.  This boy had grown up only a few streets away from the family of the monster who’d orphaned him.  They were the same streets David had played on when he was a kid.  In a way, David almost felt like he could relate to the boy, even after all these years.

 

Of course, William would be thirty-two now, older than David had been back when it had happened.

Addressing the letter, David had walked to the corner post box and dropped it in.  AS he did, his memories of that night came roiling back.

 

It had been raining.  He remembered that clearly because Becky used to love the rain.  She’d pull out one of the old quilts and wrap it around the two of them.  That night, they’d gone out to her front porch and held each other tight.

 

For seven months, they’d been together.  But something changed that night.

 

David couldn’t remember what he’d said to start it, but he remembered feeling her muscles tense.  She sat up and cursed him out.  His blood rising, he’d let his mouth run ahead of his senses.

 

“I think you’d better leave,” she’d said.

​

“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” he’d snapped.

 

“Get the fuck out of my house!”

 

She’d screamed, and he screamed right back.  Somewhere, in the mess of it all, she’d tried to hurt him.  Something she’d said, one little twist of the knife, it all blurred together.

 

But David remembered being so angry he pushed her.  Becky didn’t back down.  Coming right back, she’d slapped him across the face.

 

Then he slapped her.

 

She’d punched him.

 

He hit her.

 

She hit him again and somehow his hands ended up wrapped around her throat.  Then he squeezed.  Her hands kept hitting him.  She hit him in the jaw, the shoulder, the gut.  He just kept squeezing.

 

Her nails stabbed into his wrists, and the blood pounded in his ears like war drums as he leaned forward.  Her mouth fell open, but this time she didn’t say a word.

 

Sometimes he wondered what would’ve happened if he’d let her go.  She’d have collapsed on the ground, gasping for air.  Would she have called the police?  Would he have stayed to try and talk her down?

 

Would he have walked out the door and gone on with the rest of his life?

 

Those were the thoughts that had nearly driven him mad for the first decade inside.  Eventually, he learned that none of that shit mattered.  She’d hit him, and in response he’d grabbed her by the throat.  And when he grabbed her, she hit him harder.

 

And when she hit him harder, he’d…

 

David could still see the look on her face; the fierceness, the hate in her eyes.  She struggled, mouth waving open and closed with no sound coming out.  Her legs thrashed uselessly against the wooden boards of the deck, never gaining the traction she needed to push herself free.

 

He kept squeezing, even as her eyes turned from rage to sorrow.  He was so angry, so full of bile that he couldn’t contain it, like all the anger he’d ever felt came bursting out in that one terrible moment and took control.

 

And when Becky died and her eyes slid sideways in her skull, he kept on squeezing until he heard Becky’s two-year-old son crying inside.

 

William.

 

Most times, Becky would get up to check on him.  Tonight, she was motionless on the floor, her eyes frozen open and her mouth slack.

 

David looked down in shock.  Even as he pulled his hands away, he couldn’t quite believe what had happened.  As William cried, he stumbled onto his knees, then to his feet.

​

The air was thick, but when he looked outside he saw that the rain had stopped.

 

Bending down, David tried to nudge her shoulder.  His hand pressed on her shoulder, and her skin was already cool to the touch.

 

Becky farmer had died cold, frightened, and alone at the hands of her lover.  She’d never had the chance to say goodbye.  She’d been twenty-eight years old.

 

Three decades passed before David walked up to the post box and dropped in the letter.  He was only half-a-mile from her old house.  Inside the envelope, he’d scribbled down the most sincere apology he could manage to write during his thirty years in jail, but it felt pathetic compared to what he’d done, to the hurt he’d caused.

 

In prison, he’d sketched Becky hundreds of times: laughing, sleeping, leaning against the doorway with that cock-eyed grin.  However, the only time drawing he’d made of how he really remembered her was with the letter he’d sent, of Becky wrapped in a light blanket as she sat on her porch, a beer resting on the flat railing beside her.  He drew her with a soft, easy-going smile.  She’d smiled at him just a half-hour before he’d killed her.

 

That was how he wanted to remember her.  Everything else was just a picture he’d made up in his head.

 

The only other memory of her was too horrible to draw, her neck bruised and broken, her face twisted in pain.  He’d called the police himself.  When the time came, he’d admitted his guilt.  He’d served his time.  But he still felt like there was something he wasn’t doing.

 

Two years later, he finally got up the courage to vist her grave.  He was always afraid he’d see someone from her family there; he didn’t want to cause them anymore pain than he already had.  Still, he had to go.  Liz said it might help bring him closure.

 

Standing at her grave didn’t do a damned thing.  It was just some stone with her name carved in it.  Even the body rotting below the earth, it wasn’t really her.  She’d been gone before he took his hands away.  The thing that was left was just…dead flesh.

 

Liz told him to move on.

 

“You paid your time,” she said.

 

But David knew he hadn’t paid enough.  No prison term could make things write.  He’d always owe a debt.  If there truly was justice in the world, David would’ve been dragged out behind the courtroom and shot.

 

Being a free man, it felt like a kid playing hooky.  All those years inside, just detention.  David had never believed in God, but if he had, he knew he wasn’t worthy of salvation.

 

He’d killed a girl named Becky Farmer.  For that, David deserved worse than what he’d got.

 

Fifteen years later, sick and coughing and sure he was dying, he turned away while his nephew prayed for him.  If there was a God, the best David could hope for was to be forgotten.

 

David died in a warm bed, with what remained of his family beside him.  He had the chance to say goodbye.

 

Once the lights went out, there was only darkness.