Welcome Home

Begins: Writing equals love & passion. Middling: Writing tends towards disruption & discord. Story ends: Writing equals torture. In between: famine abuse violence death & the like. I write.

Begin at childhood but never make it far. No notice: Bright light. Blinding. Silhouetted figure appears in suddenly open doorway. Places all manuscript pages in open box on the floor. Smell of gas. Watch as paper recedes. New blanks given. Ashes are all that remain. Here I am. Here we are. All are together.

Fed once every 24 hours. Plus a vitamin. Enhanced engrained vitamin. The kind on the outside. I don’t take it. Never have. Lost left ear hearing because of it. Weak always. Sick always. Tired always. Water is constant. Drips on wall. Lick enough to sustain. Piss drain is just below. Body is nothing more than a pause for water from dirty cement to steel grate. Food is bread. Oatmeal. Tasteless. Cold. Dry & wet but meaningless. Wrecks bowels. Produces phlegm. Must eat. No option. Drop the food through the sliding panel. 2 inches x 4 inches. Deposit onto floor. Bread crushed through slot. Mush spooned on to ground. We lick it up. Gulp it down dirt piss & all. Must. Must. Shit through floor grate too. Liquid enough to go. Mostly. Vomit through grate too. Would crawl through grate and all its contents to get from here. 2 inches x 2 inches. Solid steel. Welded to piping. No screws nails etc. A little separation from surrounding floor concrete but not enough to do any good. Small pebbles exist in the crack. Roll them. Throw them. Try to keep body occupied. Doesn’t. Eat them to help stomach. Doesn’t. Not much does.

Surroundings: Cell is cement. Gray. Damp. Exceedingly cold. Ferocious darkness. Eyesight fading daily. Type mostly with eyes closed. Errors are marginal if existent. Cell is a cube. 4 x 4 x 4 feet. Haven’t stretched body since incarceration. Sleep curled. Type hunched. Eat crouched on all fours. Nothing else for setting. Noises: Guards wear dress heels or heavy duty boots. Clicking with food delivery. Entire wing of building cement concrete or the like. All hard & hollow.

Crying persists beyond everything. Crying with food with piss & stool with day with night with everything. Becomes solid moaning. Horrifying at times. Comforting at others. Have attempted dialogue numerous times. Everyone speaks another language. No communication exists beyond wailing. Trapped. All of us. Smells: Wet concrete & death. All else is product of the two. Nothing more.

There are White rooms. Stark & magnifying. There are Purple & Green & Yellow & Blue & Orange & Red rooms too. All serve a different purpose. White are interrogation. Questions with the threat & completion of physical violence. A chair. Several lamps. Officers speak not in person but through loud speaker. One speaker directly above chair. Extreme volume. Doubled for my lack of left ear functions. Violent threats spoken of and then shown on large projection screen. Full wall size. Begins with words & definitions. Goes to diagrams & technical drawings of tools & equipment. Moves to footage of recently performed procedures. Includes sound & color.

Men enter. No women. Full black suits. Single zipper running from left ankle up leg over torso & chest and to center of neck. Matching gloves boots & masks with tinted eye-shields and seeming gas-mask capabilities. Ominous & silent. Tools & equipment enter on metal cart with last set of men. Duties are to work procedure as questioning continues. No answers suffice. No words work. No responses are given. The reality of a mute. Torture is enacted. Sometimes filmed or documented. Men recede with tools & equipment. Silence & blood. Pain. Needing to die. Don’t. Will pass out.

Wake up in same cell as always. Same mush. Same grate. Typewriter with blank page inserted carefully and stack nearby. Welcome home.

__________________________________________

J. A. Tyler is author of the forthcoming novella Someone, Somewhere (Ghost Road Press, 2009) and the chapbooks The Girl in the Black Sweater (Trainwreck Press, 2008) and Everyone In This Is Either Dying Or Will Die Or Is Thinking Of Death (Achilles Chapbook Series, 2008). He is founding editor of mud luscious/ml press and nominated for a Pushcart.