𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞 ➙ 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘭 𝘨𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴

thirteen.

THIRTEEN
gray stone walls

CARL

Nights were slow on the prison grounds; they always had been. A piece of the prison that had continued for months and held no end in sight. A slump in between the time where the sun fell silent into the earth and the moment the light returned, decades seemed to have passed within the hours. The moon took its time to wash through the walls of our home, shadows easing their way into corners with no sun to space.

It had taken weeks, months even, for my body to settle into the prison. I hadn't been comfortable with the small space of the cells, how it felt like everything was on top of me, the walls and roof combined. To allow my mind to find comfort in the darkness that swept over the grounds, to accept the silence and safety for what it was, it had taken time. Oh, but there would always be plenty of time on these hands of mine.

          I was dedicated to the practice of calming myself to sleep, counting sheep into the ceiling of my bunk, humming tunes my mother used to sing to me; eventually, the nightmares would find me, anyway. There was one thing time couldn't solve, and it was the monsters still living in my dreams. The haunting of my past would always rest under my pillow every evening, no way out of the visit. Most nights ran the same, a routine I would be lucky to break; a comic book in my hand and my mind caught up elsewhere, in a world where things were better. Yet, tonight was different.

          Time was cautious in the evening that accompanied me, and I knew the reasons why it bothered me so deeply. It felt as if it had taken centuries for the sun to finally dissolve into the ground, the better half of the prison was drunk in slumber, yet I sat cold against my cell wall. I was a boy left gnawing for answers in the deep hours of the night, I had grown hungry for the truth that seemed to be miles away from an answer. It was a type of hollow ache that tore into me, begging me to feed into waters I didn't belong in.

          I knew every reason as to why things were the way that they were, but I couldn't allow myself to truly feel them. The sun crew had left in the early hours of the afternoon, but it seemed as though days had passed since I'd seen them. It was an exaggerated line, I knew that, but somehow, the day had dragged on so far, so long in its touch from dawn to dusk, that I felt as though I had been waiting on the cut of my mattress for half a week now.

          Counting down the hours on bare hands, right down to the minutes slipping by, had not helped one bit, not at all. They still hadn't returned home, and there was not a thing I could do about it. Something was odd, a bit completely off from the routine we worked so hard to create and maintain over a series of months. I wasn't part of the run crew, I had never gone on an official supply run, but I knew of the practices they worked towards keeping in place.

          In and out, a game of gathering what was useful and leaving the rest, an easy sweep that never took any longer than a couple hours on the tick of a pocket watch. They filled the crates, swept through what needed to be looked through, and called it a day. A simple process, one they had all done many times over; all, but one. Daryl made sure of it, watching the time pass by the position of the sun; he was never late. Yet, something had seemed to rock off the edge of the day. Daryl's motorcycle had not barreled through the gates and the girl's soft footsteps hadn't made their way to her cell.