by Dan Thompson
An hour later, after the tray’s contents cool, Jenny arises from her mattress and makes her way toward the stainless steel toilet. It, too, was installed with artifice: all fastening agents used for buckling it to the floor are placed carefully out of sight and reach. At one time, Jenny would have smiled at the measures taken to assure her steady and continual presence behind the door. Now she has few mundane thoughts—only misery and its accompanying friend, despair, is in her mind.
Her business is finished in view of those working the glassed-in control booth as they try to give her a semblance of privacy. She carefully washes her hands at the stainless steel sink and stares into the mirror, catching a quick, crimson glimpse before returning to sit on the stool made from the same, hard metal. The Styrofoam tray holds a small quantity of green beans, two hot dogs, a bun, and a square of chocolate cake. Bypassing the greased-over meat, Jenny reaches for the cake and cuts it in half with her plastic spoon, but before taking a bite, she spies a piece of paper, folded into the shape of a goat, an origami masterpiece hidden in the pale chocolate. Goats were used as sacrificial animals in the Bible, Jenny knows, often as propitiation for sins of the shepherd.
She feels leaden from oppression, the mental straitjacket blocking all emotion except grief. Falling from the stool, Jenny goes to her knees and begins praying amid the noises running though her conscious mind. He will try to distract her, she knows. He is watching; she saw his eyes through hers. “God,” she says, “if you’re listening, please let me die today. Don’t let him win again.” Down the MC someone begins shrieking, then another follows, until finally, Jenny can no longer hear her own voice. She says a last-minute thank you and closes her mind to all sounds. Soon the noises have abated, but the young woman on the floor is beyond hearing. Not yet dead, she grows closer to oblivion each hour.
Inside her head, where Jenny lives, a litany runs unchecked, a loop of dismal words and phrases. No more looking up when I hear a voice, because I know it won’t be my deliverance. There is none. No greeting will echo down the long corridor. I had my chances, but they were never good; a snowball’s chance in hell, or as my daddy used to say, “A Chinaman’s chance.” They’re both gone now. When the final word came, the last, slimmest possibility left my cell, sliding beneath the iron door that holds me prisoner. The last hope left my sight as it moved from my grasp, pushing a great bubble made of all the oxygen in my world, forcing it through the door’s long, slender opening. The dust of my past lifted away from these metal and cinder block walls, scurrying with hope’s wind across shined tile floors, taking my breath away.
Will I stand at the last, or will I fall clinging to a life that brought so much misery? All I can do now is gasp for air, sucking down the pollution of my wrong choices. I am forever ruined, altogether melted and formless as a child’s chewing gum spat carelessly upon a hot sidewalk. I have neither shape nor mass; he has magicked me into nothingness. Once there were people who loved me, a family: mother, father, others who gave me substance. I was eight years old when the terror began and nothing has ever been the same since.
Read the rest of The Indwelling of Jenny.
