Monday

This is how it starts, at least this is how Jake remembers it. It’s all a blur from the moment he was pulled out of his brother’s car and arrested to here. Some old geezer in a black robe pronounced him guilty and boom, he was handcuffed and led outside to a van that took him to prison. Then he was taken inside and in out and out of doors through badly lit hallways where bulbs hissed and fluttered at him and the other prisoners who are also along for this particular ride. The guards don’t say hello, but instead repeat the same orders they’ve given to a million souls. Jake is a number now instead of a name. He feels less human, like he’s nothing, like he’s owned. He feels it with each step as he continues through a series of doors that open and shut with crashes and jerks, down hallways that curve like snakes to a room where other guards tell him to take off his clothes, before they probe him for drugs and contraband. Then they tell him to take a shower and then hand him a uniform covered in black and white stripes.

The cold swiftness of this leaves some of the other prisoners trembling. Some of them shiver thinking of the rigid metallic jail cell doors slamming shut on their freedom outside. But it isn’t going to be like that for Jake. He’s convinced himself that he’s tough enough to stand it even as he feels the eyes of his cellmate tracing him from behind. “I’ll kill him if he tries to touch me,” he thinks.

“You got nothing to worry about, kid,” says his cellmate, as if he’d read Jake’s mind. “I’m going to take real good care of you. Better than your ma even.”

“I don’t need to be taken care of. I can take care of -”

“No you can’t, kid. You couldn’t even take care of yourself out there. That’s why you’re mine now.” His cellmate walks across the narrow cell. “You can fight all you want, but in the end you’ll still be mine.” He narrows the space between them and inhales deeply taking the scent of fresh meat into his nostrils. “I’ll wait ‘til you’re sleepin’ if a have to.”

All of Jake’s toughness starts dying just then as a poisonous taste fills his mouth and searing fingers of anxiety of bloom beneath his skin.

“The flipside of that is that everyone here knows and respects me. I’m the boss of this cellblock, so no one’s gonna bother you or they’ll have to answer to me,” Jake’s cellmate continues.

Photographs of various women smile perpetually even though they are ripped and torn after repeatedly being taken down when there was no one available to “be the girl.” Jake wonders if his roommate knows what the names of the woman are as he fixes on their constant smiling gazes. He knows it doesn’t matter, but it provides an escape from the fact that hands are encircling him and fingers are secreting themselves inside his pants, pushing deep and hurtfully into his buttocks.

“No!” says Jake as his cellmate laughs then spits.

“You got nowhere to go, kid. Door’s locked ‘til mornin’. So you push me away and then what? What’s gonna happen is gonna happen. Might as well face that right now.” He licks his lips between sentences. “An’ callin’ the guard ain’t gonna do nuthin’. Guard don’t care what happens to ya. I’m all you got.”

“Please,” says Jake, “I don’t want no trouble. I’m innocent. I didn’t do nuthin’. I was only driving the car, I didn’t rob nobody. I didn’t know what they were doin’ in there. I was just sittin’. I don’t belong here!”

“We’re all innocent, kid, and none of us belong here…not even me.”

Suddenly Jake is free again and time has passed. The warmer climate has been replaced by winter frost when everything is blanketed with snow and seems fresh and clean. Some red roses blossom like a blood pool on the snowy ground. He doesn’t question the doubtfulness of the scene, but allows himself this suspension with the madness of the real world. He approaches a table filled with all of his favorite foods, but instead selects some grapes from a nearby vine. He doesn’t question the fact that grapes don’t bloom in the snow, but savors their succulence which he lets trickle down his chin. He feels revived in this moment of abstract freedom. He doesn’t allow himself to notice the thump, thump, thump of his body jerking wildly or the searing pain of being internally torn. A skeleton waves at him from across the snowy scene and he knows he can no longer pretend. This is not real. This is nothing but a poor attempt to escape the horrors of prison life and the reality of rape.

After it is over and Jake is bruised blue while lying fetal and invaded on his cot. His cellmate watches him while washing himself in the toilet.

“None of us belong here kid. I was like you once; green and stupid. Thought I could talk my way out of anythin’. Thought I was tougher than anyone, but some old prison boss taught me the same lesson I just taught you. This is how it was for me, an’ it’s how it is for you. That’s just how it is. There’s no use fightin’ that fact.”

He throws Jake the toilet-wet washcloth, before rejoining him on the cot. “Clean yourself up, kid.”

Jake unconsciously obeys without a hint of emotion or care.

“Yeah you were green, an’ so was I once. Now you’re not. So just consider this your first little lesson and learn to make do. Hell it’s just Monday, by Friday you’ll be used to how things are and maybe you’ll even learn to love it.”

Jake does not hear him. He has disappeared into his wintery world where everything is white, untouched and clean, and flowers and grapes bloom and blossom in the snow.

Sunday

It was a good day to die. Those were the words of the great warrior Crazy Horse as he and other warriors of the mighty Lakota Nation faced Custer at the Battle of the Greasy Grass, called by outsiders the Battle of Little Bighorn or Custer’s Last Stand. He’d read that in a book somewhere and those words had remained in his memory even now. It had been the first and last time that Custer had fought against warriors. His legend as a great man being built on the bodies of dead women, old men and children. Of course, the papers of the day hadn’t reported that or the atrocities carried out against the helpless, unarmed and ailing, and had instead built a legend out of him.

He closed his eyes imaging the bleak atmosphere on that long ago day. The Lakota were fighting not only to protect their women, old ones and children, but for their very existence. They’d been hunted down and now, finally the opportunity had come to stand face-to-face in battle against him.

It had happened on a Sunday morning in June.

The chirping of a cricket interrupted his thoughts. He took an exaggerated drag from his cigarette and watched the smoke make odd twisted and curls in the moonlit room with shadows that crossed the floor like snakes. The chimes of a nearby church bell marked the hour as he sat back still lost in history.

After the battle, many of the Lakota women had mutilated the corpses of the 7th Calvary soldiers. No doubt it was revenge for what had occurred to so many of their sisters, mothers and daughters who had been mutilated while alive by many of these same men who had made an odd game of playing catch with the amputated breasts of Native women. Custer’s body was spared this same because of his past association with the Cheyenne during the Civil War. Instead, they had removed only one of his fingers and poked his eardrums with sewing awls, in hopes that it would help “to improve his hearing” in the next life.

He smirked as he recounted that particular event, even though he knew the Lakota’s victory was to be short-lived and that it would all end years later with many of them dead and frozen at Wounded Knee.

“Still they knew they had beaten him,” he said to his wood-paneled walls. He put his hands to his ears as the sounds of wailing women crying over dead warriors and children filled his consciousness. But he could still hear their moaning and shrieking.

He opened his mouth thinking that he could out scream and finally silence them, but their voices rose above his until his broke and dissolved into a croaking hush. Tears streamed down his grizzled cheeks as he squeezed his eyes shut. Spinning fractals circle danced inside his closed eyelids temporarily calming his distraught mind. The voices faded but remained like a distant echo as he slowly opened his eyes. He had heard them before. He knew the names and faces that belonged to each one. They were voices of history, his history and theirs. They had come like they had always come, to remind him of his past and their mutual destruction, and how like those Native American women on that long ago Sunday, would teach him how to finally listen.

The police had interrogated him, but been forced to release him because there wasn’t enough evidence and he had won his own short-lived victory. Like the Lakota he had learned to live on the run, journeying from one city to another, from one life to another, until finally he come to this moment.

Curiosity had led him to study about the Lakota. Their history had been an escape from the moments when his other self had overtaken him and forced him from being a mere troublemaker into someone who terrorized women and young girls. Even as he’d watched the eyes of his victims turn from tender expectations brought by his handsome smile, into ever-widening pleading orbs, he’d felt nothing. It wasn’t until he’d learned about the horrors visited on Lakota women and girls from over one hundred years ago that he’d begun to summon up the last dredges of his own humanity. It wasn’t until then that he’d heard the voices which came and chased him from city to city and reckoning to reckoning. It wasn’t until then that he’d realized that death can come in bitter stages or suddenly with the quick tightening of a noose.

They had brought out the last best bit of him. These warriors and their warrior women had forced him to finally listen to the voices he had silenced. He stood precariously on a stool in the middle of his wood-paneled room. Before kicking it from under him, he saw a can of canned corn sitting on his kitchen self.

“The Lakota would have called it maize,” he said to the stillness of his room.

Yes, it was a good day to die.

Tuesday

Going postal would have been easy, too easy on this day so very far away from Eden and its promised perfection. A crow circled overhead while she journeyed past a gravesite where a flowered covered mound housed the remains of a stranger whose named she’d missed on the news. The Spartan landscape had been something grander in its heyday, now it harvested junkyards that rose and collapsed like the swollen bellies of starving children.

She spit out her gum and silently remarked how it resembled a cloud caught in the mud. The horn of a nearby ferry summoned her back from odd thoughts about rodeos and runners and the sound that raindrops made on her grandmother’s tin roof. She would be late for work again. She would hear her boss call her a “stupid junky girl” and threaten to fire her after first taking away her awful puce-colored uniform and the joy of serving sweet potato fries to sweaty old men who thought it charming to demand free cups of coffee, while copping cheap feels. They didn’t know that she imagined each of them dead with their severed heads on spikes that she—their murderer—held high as she danced in the shadow of the Bastille.

Returning once again to herself, she surveyed the restaurant and its attempt to appear tropical and far away from its own bleak reality. The owner’s wife had decorated it with raffia placemats, photographs of travel posters and plastic hula dancers that lined the counter and swayed in unison to the coughs, belches and sighs of unsatisfied staff and customers.

This was how she spent her day; disappearing from the ticky-tack ticking of miseries that languished like cats in rainy day doorways waiting for a glimpse of profundity. Mundane conversations drifted in and out of her consciousness like stark sea waters impinging on the arsenal of daydreams she valiantly conjured in an attempt to escape. This was not how this day was supposed to have played out. It didn’t matter that every day played out in the same way beginning and ending with anti-bacterial soap, wallpaper peonies that she and her mother had selected when they’d decorated her room or the smell of coffee and grease that penetrated the rooms with age.

“I am one year older today,” she said looking at her reflection in the cracked mirror of the employee washroom. “I am one year closer to oblivion and eternity.” She searched her knapsack and found her iPod. It would be a long walk home and she would need the comfort of Lead Belly and Johnny Cash singing about prisoners and prisons to remind her that to the rest of the world it was just another day.

Beneath the Red-Hot Sky

The shadow woman swept up the ashen words of conversations that dissipated into smoke in the new morning breeze. She collected each fragment like puzzle pieces, not trying to put them back together, but instead to form new truths of her own making, born from her own experience and the wisdom from her grandmother’s lips that trickled down like rain.

That was the only comfort earth’s children had as the blistering heat beat them all into submission as it absorbed every bit of moisture from the air. There would be no running today; no need for any of them to rush about as if they had purpose. Today was a day for stillness and calm. Even the birds were quiet in the sweltering scorch of daybreak.

A lone sweat droplet clung to the tip of a man’s nose teasing any who saw him with the possibility of its finally falling. Somehow it remained; adjusting its grasp to every syllable and head-jerk, he uttered. He had forgotten old lessons, old words. He shuffled through the day unaware of his new companion beneath the red-hot sky.

Across town, a mother yelled at howling baby. The AC was broken and the rent was due. She existed amid the stench of dirty diapers and clichés. She didn’t have time for lessons. She wasn’t aware of anything but the sweat-stained sheets on her empty bed and the baby she couldn’t calm in the stifling heat.

They were like so many others on that fervid day. They were certain it would pass as all things passed.

Shadow woman felt the blazing air thicken like sludge. The weight of old words was stifling. There was no fixing the current climate of misunderstandings and cloudy judgments. People would have to learn how to rearrange their own thoughts and words one day. She was weakening. There had been too many fiery exchanges of late, and she hadn’t been able to provide the necessary serenity to cool them.

The world was moving too fast. So much faster than the days of old stories repeated on parched lips. Some words had ignited wars, caused radioactive calamities. It was all too much. The only hope was rain. The only hope was that the mercy of the rain hadn’t dried alone and it would be enough to satiate old words and restore tranquility to this charged atmosphere.

"We are all one, my children," she murmured still hoping they would learn. "We are all one."

Through Window Glass

Yesterday, humidity hung in the air, heavy and unrelenting causing time to slow down and surrender to its will. Days passed between noon and three as people sat and waited for the first hint of a breeze. It did not come, nor did any sign of refreshment awaken them from the stupor summer heat.

It had just been this morning when she’d looked out the window and seen a garbage man give the finger to the sky. She smiled at him, this modern-day Nimrod, warring against the powers of the heavens, certain to fail but defiant nonetheless.

He’d seen her standing there in her nightgown, the one that was see-through in just the right light, and lowered his dime-store sunglasses before giving her a salacious look.

She jumped away from the window, though she knew it had been too late. He had seen her in full-view. There was nothing to hide anymore. She had revealed herself unknowingly even as he had done the same to the sky. She clung to the wall, even though she was well out of his range of vision. It didn’t matter, because she could still feel him there. He was waiting for her to return. He had forgotten the heat of this unnaturally hot day.

After creeping into the bedroom and closing the door, she opened the medicine cabinet looking for something to sedate her away from the revelations she’d revealed through window glass.

“My body is a feast of poignant remorse,” she sighed. “Beauty no longer sits on me with queenly ease.”

She heard the garbage truck grumble its way down the street and walked to the window to draw the curtain across exhausted and bloodshot glass. She was wrong; he wasn’t there, having long abandoned any hopes of a second glimpse of her silky turquoise shadows and reveals.

He would think of her every garbage day, wondering, hoping that she would appear once again. Years would pass as his thoughts careened from the truth of what he’d seen to the perfection of what he’d created in memory. By the time he was old, she’d become every great beauty from the beginning of time.

She had continued the day feeling ashamed because of the vulnerability of nakedness while journeying from a new guacamole recipe, to the cupboard and back in hopes of forgetting herself in mindlessness. The low hum of barge music across the bay and the songs of cicada honeyed the stillness of afternoon heat. Months later when the earth had circled another half-year, she’d gone to a party and schmoozed with the host about the importance of unimportant things.

The furnace blew hot air across the room, summoning gooseflesh as the memory of that day beckoned her back. What had been so important about any of it that it lingered? She’d shared a moment with a stranger that been more real than all the pointless conversations she’d begun, harvested and ended.

She darted across the room between conversations about “Catcher in the Rye,” “The Nutcracker” and the current confusion about the current state of the affairs of the world. There were no answers, only words that rested upon each other in an exhausted orgy of waste.

Walking home in the confused hush of the city, amongst the debris of forgotten dreams and ambitions, she’d stumbled across a pair of broken goggles. Her face reflected back from the mirrored lens that was shattered on the pavement. Hours later as she removed the eyelet lace blouse that revealed tiny patterns of peek-a-boo skin, she heard the low growl of a garbage truck in the distance and turned out the light.