Crystal Eaters

Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones

Book: Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones Read Free Book Online
Authors: Shane Jones
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anything.”
    “I think the most selfish people are the quietest.” More spit, a deeper shade of red. “Promise you won’t leave again. I need you here. We do. What do you think it’s like to be zero?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Maybe it’s like the city.”
    “Concrete and endless noise?”
    “Wonder if I’ll feel anything.”
    “Phones, politicians.”
    “Wonder if it smells like anything.”
    “Does that matter?”
    “They have a hospital.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” says Dad, and comes back to her and sits on the edge of the bed and rubs her legs in long deep strokes that she doesn’t notice. He loves her, but can’t handle what is happening because he can’t control it. Later, he’ll walk to the kitchen for the spitting cloth. It will be the last time – the cloth the texture and color of smashed cherries disintegrating over his hands as he rinses it out. He wants to ask her again about her dreams. He wants to know what’s wrong with them.
    “I can’t feel you.”

19
     
    H e receives a letter from Brothers Feast saying the jailbreak in reverse has been finalized and they are coming into the prison. He’s traded letters with Z. and they’ve worked together on the escape plan and everything is ready. McDonovan knows breaking in is risky, teetering on the absurd, but it’s worth it because there’s a chance he will see his family. Mom wrote there’s a new dog named Hundred who has one yellow eye and one black. She and Dad haven’t been getting along (nothing new) and something about a truck accident in the street (truck wrecked, bad back). In his reply letter he asks for a specific date and time, wondering how they could forget something so crucial.
    She’s tried the black crystal and the sensation is an illusion to a rising number. Black crystal foams your eyes with what you think are crystals stacking inside your body, the pyramid growing, but it doesn’t hold. At first she felt better from her sickness, but later, the rush of illness flooded back stronger. He wrote And everyone wants to live longer, how sad. I will see you guys soon. There’s been talk of my release. Love and all things good, Adam . She touched his name.
    Pants is escorted by a guard through the prison’s exercise room and into the basketball court. Inside his left shoe his foot is bandaged from the destruction of his big toe, the shard ofblack crystal that ate away the nail and much skin during the health meeting. The guard tells him to stop dragging his feet by tapping his club on the back of his thighs.
    Today is a privilege day. This occurs about once a month. Administrators have inmates use the basketball court, run a track outside, or allow a one-hour session in the gym with light weights. There’s a rumor about a swimming pool, but Pants has never been taken because the follow-up rumor is that someone drowned in the swimming pool, the body quickly disposed of, wrapped in painter’s plastic and tossed into the afternoon garbage truck.
    Two steel doors painted white open. He’s pushed inside, the guard kind of shrugging when Pants gives him a look back. The doors close with a clang followed by a second clang that is the lock. The floor is shoe-scuffed parquet. A layer of shellac seals dents and gives glare. The single basketball hoop is a transparent charcoal-dusted backboard with red rim, no net, which is attached to a cement wall. Glued on all four walls are six-foot-high sections of cushioned matting in gray, red, and blue. The ball sits under the hoop and Pants jogs slowly, his white shorts riding up, and grabs it.
    His first shot is a fourteen-foot jumper with no arc that arrows through the no-net. He runs to the ball that bounces off the padded wall. Sneakers squeak with each sharp but careful turn. Pants, on the baseline, drives in for a lay-up while a guard with a head like a hamburger looks in from a window above. He takes more shots, lost in thoughts of childhood because his only future thought

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