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WORDS

  by Mike Ramon

  © 2015 M. Ramon

  This work is published under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0). To view this license:

  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

  If you wish to contact the author you can send e-mail to:

  [email protected]

  Web addresses where you can find my work:

  https://www.wattpad.com/user/ZeroTheHero

  I

  The display of the machine next to my bed has all sorts of numbers on it. My blood pressure, my heart rate. The curtain is slightly open, and a shaft of warm sunlight falls over the foot of the bed. It hurts to move, and even if it didn’t I wouldn’t be able to move much anyhow. I can still feel the bite of the straps against my wrists, and the pressure of the strap running across my chest. The doctor explained to me that they were strapping me down for my own safety as much as for the safety of himself and the other hospital staff.

  They say I bit a nurse’s face. I also tried to gouge out a security guard’s eyes. I don’t remember doing those things. I have a vague memory of bashing my head against the floor repeatedly when I fell out of my bed after a tussle with a couple of male nurses. I ended up with a gash that required twelve stitches.

  Now I’m strapped down, but the nurses and the doctor still look scared whenever they come in. A security guard escorts them whenever they enter the room. It’s not always the same guard, and never the one whose eyes I tried to pry out. I can tell they’ve all heard about that particular incident, though. One of the guards is a great big hulk of a man, with a forehead like a rocky cliff. Every time he comes into the room he gives me a look that tells me exactly what he would do to me if he had a few minutes alone with me. I don’t blame him. I don’t blame anyone except myself.

  It’s my own fault. I was warned, but I didn’t listen. Maybe I was just curious. You know what curiosity did to that ill-fated cat. So it’s all on me. I can’t even blame Winslow. He can’t help it that he can see things clearer than the rest of us, and he can’t help it that people like me can’t handle it when he tells us the truth.

  I’m tired, bone tired. The kind of tired that sleep can’t fix. I just can’t stand it. I can’t stand knowing.

  Knowing is the hard part.

  II

  I’d heard about Winslow my first day on the job. It was my first session with the Brighter Futures group. The group was made up primarily of cons who were close to their parole date. Some of the group members had parole dates that were farther off, in some cases decades off; those ones probably came because they were lonely, or bored.

  The group would sit in a circle, myself amongst them, and I would go around the circle, allowing each man to talk about his problems, the mistakes that had led him to Plainview State Prison, and the hopes they had for their life on the outside, which most of them would shortly resume, even if only for a brief time.

  On that first day there was one member of the group who didn’t join the circle. He grabbed one of the chairs from the circle and dragged it off a ways, sitting down so that he wasn’t quite facing the circle. He just sat there, his arms folded over his thin chest, staring off at nothing. When I asked him to join the rest of us he gave no indication of having heard me. When I asked a second time another prisoner spoke up.

  “Leave him alone,” the orange jump-suited con said. “Ain’t none of us wanna hear anything he has to say. And, brother, neither do you.”

  The other guys nodded agreement. I left it alone. At the next meeting the thin man did it again, pulling a chair away from the circle so he could sit off by himself. After the meeting was over, as the other prisoners were filing out, I went over to the man.

  “What’s your name, son?” I asked.

  He looked at me, then looked away. He uncrossed his arms and stood up, replacing the chair to the circle before heading for the door. He turned back just long enough to say three words:

  “My name’s Winslow.”

  III

  I had a bad dream. I can’t remember what it was, or maybe I’m just lying to myself about not remembering. The curtain is closed. It’s dark outside anyway. The room is dim, with just the light coming from the hall through the open door. The IV in my arm burns a little, but I don’t mind. The room is overly warm, but there’s not much I can do about it. My wrists are still strapped down, so I can’t reach for the button to buzz for a nurse. I can feel the sweat on my brow; I’m not sure if it’s from the warmth of the room, or from the panic of the dream. Maybe both.

  It’s raining outside. I can hear it pelting lightly against the window. I want it to keep raining. I want the rain to drown the whole world.

  I’m being dark again, thinking negative thoughts. I can’t help it; I’m sorry.

  I like the sound of the rain. It’s soothing. I want to sleep, but I’m afraid of what I’ll see in the darkness behind my eyelids. I’m scared of what may find me in my dreams.

  IV

  Winslow was not at the third meeting. Nobody answered at first when I inquired about him. Finally one of the group members spoke up.

  “Infirmary,” he said. “He tried talking to a guard, and the guard fucked him up.”

  After the meeting I walked down to the prison infirmary, and sure enough Winslow was there. I found him lying in a bed, his face an ugly eggplant color. He must have sensed someone was watching him, because one puffy eye opened and rolled to settle on me. Then his eye closed again, and for some reason it felt like a great relief that he was no longer looking at me.

  I wanted to know what had happened. I talked to somebody who told me to talk to somebody else, who in turn told me to talk to a third person. This last person was one of the warden’s underlings. What he told me pretty much confirmed what that prisoner in the group had told me. Winslow had said a few words to a guard, and the guard had clubbed the crap out of him.

  “No one has told you about Winslow yet?” the underling asked me. “About…what he can do?”

  That was when I heard the whole thing.

  Franklin Jeffrey Winslow, prisoner #4166531, had been given a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for the murder of a convenience store clerk in the commission of a robbery. The funny part was that Winslow could have gotten away. The convenience store was in the middle of nowhere up in Juniper County. It took the cops twenty minutes to respond to the silent alarm. They arrived to find Winslow sitting on the curb outside of the store, a bloodstained bag of cash set down next to him.

  He pled guilty. When he was sentenced his only words were, “Why don’t you pussies have the guts to kill me?”

  That was how he came to be a resident of the Plainview Hotel, as some of the inmates were fond of calling it.

  For the first two years of his stay at Plainview Winslow barely uttered a word to anyone. No one paid him any mind. He was just some weirdo who shot a clerk. Many residents of the Hotel had done much worse things. If he wanted to keep to himself, then let the man keep to himself.

  When Winslow’s first cellmate was paroled they moved another guy in with him. This new cellmate was not the “let the man keep to himself” type. Word was that this new guy, a beast of a man by the name of Farmington, thought nothing of antagonizing the little guy who shared a cell with him.

  One day Farmington stood in the middle of the prison yard, slipped a jagged pieced of hard plastic out of the cuff of one pant leg, smiled a broad grin for the whole world to see, then jammed the plastic shard into his throat repeatedly. He died of massive blood loss.

  It took two more cellmates dying, one who swallowed half a gallon of bleach in the prison laundry and one who cracked his own head open by smacking it against a cinderblock wall, before they stopped giving Winslow cellmates. Tha
t was when people started to fear him.

  V

  Lorraine came early in the morning. When she saw me in bed, with wires and tubes snaking around my body, she burst into tears.

  I guess I said some terrible things to her. By the time she ran out of the room she was crying for a whole different reason. I’m not sure what I said to her, but I know it wasn’t anything good.

  I can’t help it. It’s always with me now. Just as you can’t unsee something, you can’t unlearn a truth once it has been revealed to you. The truth is in me now, like a poison in the blood.

  Fuck it all. Fuck, fuck. Fuck it all.

  Fuck.

  VI

  The story didn’t end there. There was the guard who tripped Winslow in the mess hall for a laugh, like an overgrown grade school bully. Winslow had picked himself up off the ground and calmly leaned close to the guard. Winslow whispered a few words to him.

  The guard called in sick for the next three days. On the fourth day he shot himself in the head while parked on the side of Highway 44.

  There was the bleeding heart prison advocate who kept coming to see Winslow. The woman was convinced that prisoners like Franklin Winslow were victims of a morally bankrupt society. He saw her a few times, but something she said on the second-to-last time must have angered him. He told her to never come see him again. She came again anyway.

  As was customary, Plexiglas separated prisoner from visitor. In the Plexiglas there was a metal plate with holes punched in it to allow them to speak. Winslow leaned in close to the metal plate with holes, and whispered to the woman for a few minutes. A prison guard who saw her leave that day said that she looked pale as a ghost, and that she moved like someone who was half asleep. The guard asked her if she was okay.

  “Oh, yes. I’m okay now,” she had said.

  She had said one other thing, the guard claimed. She looked him in the eye.

  “None of this matters,” she said.

  She left the prison that day, drove to the Kingston River and jumped in. They found her body six hours later.

  Winslow didn’t have any visitors after that. He didn’t talk to anyone much at all after that, and when he did they showed him how much they didn’t want to hear what he had to say. One fellow prisoner had stabbed him after Winslow had merely said “Hi” while passing in the halls. The prisoner had been moved to segregation, as much to protect him from Winslow as to protect Winslow from him.

  The guard who had put Winslow in the infirmary had been fired, so there was no chance that Winslow might whisper poison in his ear in retaliation.

  It was a crazy story. I didn’t know how much of it I could buy.

  After his recovery for the beating Winslow resumed his attendance at the Brighter Futures meetings, always pulling a chair away to sit alone. There was no real reason for him to attend. He had no future. He would stay at the Plainview Hotel until he died, and then he would be thrown into an unmarked grave.

  He came anyway.

  VII

  Father forgive us for what we have done. Father forgive us for what we have done. Father forgive us for what we have done. Father forgive us for what we have done. Father…

  What was I thinking about? What was it? My head is all screwed up. It hurts. I can’t think straight. Okay, think. No, don’t think. Forget. Forget it all. Forget everything.

  She said none of this matters. She was right. But she can’t have been right. Please don’t let her be right.

  The machines are beeping. They are measuring my heartbeats. They are measuring my life. And none of this matters.

  VIII

  I couldn’t help myself. Like the famously deceased cat, I couldn’t keep my curiosity at bay for long. One day, after a meeting, I asked Winslow to stay for a while. He didn’t respond, but he kept his seat as the other prisoners filed out of the room, and I took that as proof that he had heard. One prisoner turned back as he left, looking from Winslow to me and shaking his head.

  When we were alone in the room I grabbed a chair and set it so that I could sit and face Winslow. He stared into my eyes without any hint of menace or coldness. He didn’t’ seem dangerous at all. He was just a skinny little guy who didn’t look like he could hurt a fly.

  “Is there anything you would like to say to me?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond.

  “I heard a story about you…I heard--”

  “You want to know, don’t you?” he interrupted me.

  “What’s that?”

  “You want to know what I said to them. You want to know what I could possibly have said to those people to make them do what they did.”

  “Well, to be honest, I’m not sure anything you said to them had anything to do with them…harming themselves. Coincidences happen.”

  “Yes, you do believe. And you want to know. I’ll tell you if you want me to.”

  “You can tell me whatever you wish to. This is a safe space, Mister Winslow.”

  A sound came out of his throat that might have been laughter.

  “No. It’s not safe. Not at all.”

  “Maybe we should talk another time--”

  “Let’s talk now,” he said. “Let me tell you the joke. It’s a real riot.”

  “Joke?”

  “The joke about the silly little creatures who thought that their pathetic little lives mattered. Who thought there was some meaning to it all.”

  “Do you think there is any meaning in your life, Mister Winslow?”

  He smiled a thin, mirthless smile.

  And he talked. He told me the truth, the one truth, the only truth, peeling back the mask of the world to let me see it naked for the first time. When he was done speaking I knew how pointless all of my worries, my hopes and my disappointments all were. I knew that none of this matters. It was a terrible knowledge, but also oddly comforting.

  Winslow left me alone. I left the prison, got into my car and started home. One the way home I hit the gas and steered my car into a telephone pole.

  I woke up in the hospital.

  IX

  And now I know. Now I know.