Today is just running slow. I hope the world got everything out of it’s system this morning because otherwise this is going to be a very long day. Still we must push on. Forward! To the morning prompt, and normality beyond…well my sort of normality anyway. Let’s go with the prompt.
Interesting. Now I am going to have to figure out how he got to this prison and why. But I don’t mind having something the back of my brain can work on while I work.
Thursday, June 1st: If he stood on his toes, he could just see out.
If he stood on his toes, he could just see out. It was not an inspiring sight. Beyond his concrete prison there was a steep rocky slope that led to the sea. The boulders looked designed to break the ankles of anyone attempting to move through them at faster than a snail’s speed. At the shore there was a thin strip of sand that might optimistically be called beach, but in many of the spots, the rocks proceeded deep into the water.
Once there the water took over and the ocean stretched for what seemed like miles. In the distance he could see some kind of dark haze that made him think that there was land.
He relaxed and set his feet both firmly on the concrete ground again. His calf muscles thanked him for their relief. He slowly crossed the small square box of his room and flopped down on the metal bed provided. It was a stout thing made of solid chunks of metal that were bolted into both the floor and the wall. The room was only as wide as his bed. Two steps in either direction and he hit a wall. The frame of the bed was bolted to both the concrete wall by its legs and the two walls to either side of what he cautiously referred to as the head and footboards. There were no springs of smaller metal bits. The base of the bed was a sheet of metal with reinforced slats running through it. The mattress was a large sack stuffed with something more or less soft. He supposed it started off soft and then time and use had made it less so. Since it was his one place of refuge he didn’t want to think about it too much.
He sat down on his bed. Nothing creaked or sighed or shifted in anyway. He frowned, feeling as thought the bed informed him that he was inconsequential.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’
This place seemed designed to beat a person down. This was not a prison intent on reforming anyone. It was a place where they housed people who had done wrong and tried to suck as much life out of them as possible so that when their term was ended they did not have the will to commit any sort of crime again. He heard whispers that no one ever really left and that instead of being released the prisoner who finished histamine was merely taken down to the prison crematorium, strangled and tossed in.
Peter was certain other prisoners had different sorts of gossip, but when he saw his fellow inmates the debate going around was between strangulation or beating being the final end to the prisoners. It was just that sort of place. The inevitably of death after incarceration had solidified into fact.
‘Maybe they know something I don’t,’ he thought. He was willing to concede it was probable that everyone knew more than him. He didn’t know how he got here or even what his crimes were supposed to be. He wasn’t even sure where here was. Anytime he heard a place name it seemed unaccountably strange and fit with no place he could think of. ‘And now this,’ he thought. Three days prior the prison went into what he thought of as lockdown mode. All of the prisoners stayed in their cells and twice a day a guard came by with a meal.
Ten til Midnight 