SHORT STORIES: Watch Closely

Officers Pelowitz and Fonte were making their usual rounds when they heard a new sound, a piercing irregular tone that they hadn’t heard before amongst the banging and yelling of the inmates. They took two steps back to get a better look at what was happening in cell 3E-14 and saw the inmate scratching symbols into the wall. They knew not to step closer to the bars, but it was always a good idea to keep an eye out when the inmates were acting weird.

“Fonte, grab a chair,” Pelowitz sighed.

Fonte came back with two chairs and placed them in front of cell 3E-14. The inmate was working on scratching his first symbol into the wall with such concentration that it seemed as if his life depended on the perfection of the shape. His hand was so close to the wall that Pelowitz first thought he was using his fingernails, but as he was pointing it out to Fonte, he realized there would be red trails on the wall and on the inmate’s hand. Fonte spoke out.

“Whatcha got there, huh?”

All of a sudden, Pelowitz and Fonte saw inmate 3E-14’s thumb move too close to the wall. He dropped the tool he had been using and pulled his arm back in shock, then began to suck on the tip of his thumb. While he was doing so, the officers had time to look to the ground but they didn’t recognize the tool that was being used. A peculiarly shaped object had clattered to the cell floor, waiting to be picked up again. They felt the urge to unlock the cell and take the object, especially as they couldn’t quite see what it was, but they hesitated.

Inmate 3E-14, a rather frail being who seemed more skeleton than man, reached down to pick it up and in a few seconds that felt like minutes for the officers, Fonte remarked that the man’s bones sounded like the gears of an ancient clock tower. By then, the inmate had gotten back up again and resumed his Sisyphean task. He seemed content with his first symbol which Pelowitz claimed to be the number three, while Fonte was convinced it was an Epsilon. He did not remember exactly what an Epsilon was.

Both of their walkie-talkies crackled to life.

“What are you two doing out there?”

Neither of them had realized how late it had gotten. They stood, picked up their chairs and walked back to the main room, getting ready to change shifts. “Cell 3E-14 is scratching on the walls now,” Fonte said to Hales, exchanging their double-handed secret handshake of front-back-up-down-twist-switch-thumb war. Hales nodded knowingly, picked up a notepad and beckoned newbie Irk over to go make the rounds. Pelowitz and Fonte left for home.

Early the next morning they came to start their shift and took over from Lehr and Palmer, the two oldest officers in the facility. The men told Pelowitz and Fonte that inmate 3E-14 was sleeping. The two officers commenced their round, but took the chairs with them this time, just in case. Once they reached the cell, they saw that a new symbol was on the wall, which Fonte called a T and Pelowitz read as a Y. The inmate was still sleeping, however, so they decided to keep making their rounds until he woke up again.

Around the third time they reached cell 3E-14, its fragile inmate was slowly getting back on his feet and starting to draw again. He had his food lying in his cell, but he ignored it. The officers didn’t realize that he was looking straight at them while continuing to draw his symbols, thinking that he was keeping his eye on the prize for him completing whatever bizarre message he was chiselling into the walls.

“Do you think we should have taken that thing from him yesterday when we had the chance?” Pelowitz asked reflectively. Fonte nodded, starting to feel uncomfortable, but not quite knowing why.

After two further scratches, inmate 3E-14 began to talk. His voice was soft, slow and as fragile as the vessel it came from, but it had an underlying note of urgency as if the words were being forced out of his mouth.

“I ask many questions here in this cell, but one question in particular has always eluded me. I apologize, let me introduce myself. My mother was a teacher,” he rasped, pausing to swallow. “And my father drank. For the first ten years of my life, I thought he worked at the bar, but I soon realized the only part of his body that worked was his liver. Each evening he came home, a ticking time bomb with a broken clock, asking my mother to tend to his every will, and she had no choice but to comply, for my sake. She didn’t want me to grow up in a violent household.”

“Wait, you said there was one question you never asked yourself. Which one was that?” Pelowitz asked, snapping Fonte out of his trance.

“All in due time, officers. She often had no time left to prepare lessons, and parents complained to the school whenever she arrived with bruises. She lost her job on my eleventh birthday. My father took it personally that she couldn’t provide for the family anymore, and grew increasingly violent and insatiable. My twelfth birthday present was a concussion and my thirteenth was a visit from the tooth fairy.”

“On my fourteenth, I got a shovel. My mother was killed, in a fit of rage. My father hit her in the head with the bottle of scotch whiskey that was as old as him . He told me to dig, so I dug a hole in the yard behind our house, the yard I always thought belonged to us. I found out just days later that it belonged to our next door neighbours, the nicest couple I knew. They always took care of me when my family couldn’t.”

Inmate 3E-14 moved towards the bed.

“The police took care of them and the body,” he said, his carving clattering on the ground next to the bed.

Pelowitz and Fonte felt uncomfortable, but they kept their eyes on the inmate. They had heard many prisoners attempt to talk themselves out of their cells, but this felt different. It felt less urgent.

“My father realized he needed to find a way for our family to make money, so he put me in touch with some of his old contacts. My fifteenth birthday present was a pair of handcuffs as I waited for my father to pick me up from the police station, arrested for possession with intent to sell. He never arrived. A week later they let me go out of pity.”

“I’m so sorry,” Fonte blurted out, feeling the unexpected sting of tears in his eyes.

“Please,” the inmate continued. “I do not need your pity too. I have had more than enough of that.

“When I went home my father scolded me for not having paid the rent. We were being evicted. I could not and did not want to take his nonsense anymore, so I brought him his fairy dust, and he bit it. I dug him a grave two blocks away in my old principal’s yard, as if hurting the person who fired my mother could somehow resurrect her.”

“It couldn’t, but my supply could. I kept selling on the streets, taking out anyone who would stand in my way, and I made my way up the ranks. My sixteenth birthday present was a handgun, and I gave my boss a finger for Christmas. My seventeenth birthday present was a suburb of my own, and at eighteen years of age, I became second in command. It took me another twenty-seven years to realize that I was working for my own uncle, who knew what I had done to his brother, and loved me for it.”

Fonte cocked his head. “So, what was the question?”

3E-14 narrowed his eyes. “Patience,” he said, a tinge of emotion now in his voice.

“He told me stories about how my father had taken everything from him, about how my father had stolen his wife and destroyed his life. He told me the one thing he knew he could take away was my father’s job as a policeman, and I realized that my uncle was the reason I grew up to be who I am. Years before I was born, my father was an honourable man. He would’ve wanted me to turn the whole gang in. I did nothing of the sort. I did what the version of my father that I knew would have done.”

Pelowitz and Fonte heard their walkie-talkies signal that someone was at the door, so they went to handle it, uneasy about what was happening and wondering at how interested they were in the terrible story.

“I don’t want to believe that all of that could happen to someone,” Pelowitz said. “But somehow, I trust him.”

“Woah, trust? I don’t know if you can use that word in this situation. I think he’s definitely not completely lying, but damn if I don’t need to know what happens next.”

“Are you, saying you should go back after our shift is done?” Pelowitz felt his guts tie into a knot. Fonte looked him in dead in the eye and nodded.

When they reached the door, they saw the next shift waiting outside. Opening the door, Pelowitz and Fonte were told that both Hales and Johnson had left their keys by the main desk, in the drawer. They wanted to listen to the end of inmate 3E-14’s story, so they took a donut each and wandered back to his cell, leaving the second shift to do the rounds.

“I can see you still do not quite trust me. You may come closer, I will not bite.” the inmate stated, still in the same position as before they left. He smiled and showed a set of teeth the same shade as the rings below his eyes.

“I shall continue. I had no use for a boss who had ruined the first thirty-five years of my life, even if they shaped me to become the man I am today. He was buried in the same yard as my father was.”

Pelowitz and Fonte moved their chairs slightly closer together.

“I seized control over the empire my uncle had stolen from low-life criminals and ruled it with an iron fist for twenty years. Any sign of weakness was promptly eliminated, and those who knew me both loved me and feared me. Eventually, I knew every criminal in the city, and every one of them was indebted to me in some way. My second in command betrayed me, selling the entire empire out to the cops, telling them that I was in command of it all, and I was dropped here, in this festering pile of horseshit.”

The inmate’s voice suddenly had become much harsher, spitting on the two guards as he uttered those final syllables. “This is where the question comes in. The one question I have never asked myself in all of my miserable time here is this: Why –”

Suddenly, the inmates in the cell that was currently behind Pelowitz and Fonte tapped them on the shoulder. They turned around, shocked that they had gotten so close to that door, and prepared their tasers.

“Woah, woah, woah,” the prisoner croaked. “I was just gonna ask if I could please have some water, dude, I’m totally dehydrated.”

When they came back from the cafeteria with the water, Inmate 3E-14 had slit his throat with what now seemed to be a shard of mirror.

“Oh shit!”

Panicking, Pelowitz and Fonte quickly took their keys and unlocked the cell, running in to check on him. They called on their walkie-talkies for Hales or Johnson to fetch a doctor, then saw one of the letters reflecting in the mirror shard.

“Hey Fonte,” Pelowitz asked, “What does the stuff there on the wall say to you when you read it through this here mirror shard?” Fonte squinted at the shard and read three letters aloud: “First it’s a B, then probably a Y, and then an E. That spells – “Bye”.

“Oh shit!”

Inmate 3E-14 was on his feet, holding a metal pipe in his hand, the fake wound starting to peel off his neck. Pelowitz and Fonte recoiled, but couldn’t react fast enough before the inmate hit them in the head.

When they finally woke up, the sirens were blaring, red lights flickering in the hall. The two guards struggled to stand up, their heads throbbing and saw that all the cell doors were open.

As they stumbled through the halls, still heavily bleeding from the wounds on their heads, they saw Hales and Johnson sprawled along the floor, their heads kicked in, their bodies trampled over. Fonte pulled his phone out of his pocket and managed to dial three digits but his phone clattered to the floor just as fast as he slumped together. Pelowitz used his last bit of strength to press call, but he never heard anyone pick up.