Solitary Refinement Chapter 2


Dear Josh        June 30 2017

Hey man, are you doing okay? I’ve been thinking about you and the other guys, I miss movie night and beer and pizza. I really appreciate you writing to me the other day, it was so nice to get mail. Everyday I hope for some but it usually doesn’t happen. To answer your question, no the food isn’t too bad and yes it is scary in here. I’m kind of freaked out that somebody is going to hurt me if I look at them the wrong way, I’m trying to stay quiet and lay low.

Liz and the kids haven’t written to me or visited, not even on Father’s Day, nothing not a peep in any way shape or form. Are they okay? Have you heard anything from them? I suspect that her parents and mine will help her financially in any way she needs but I’m still worried about them. It’s my job to worry, it’s about all I can still do from here.

It was so weird getting here. Being told I’m doing time for armed robbery. Minimum sentence, first time offender and all but still five years is a really long time. My son will be ten years old when I get out. Ten! My daughter will be eight, I’m going to miss so much. I’m going to miss teaching them to ride a bike, and their first home runs.

Can you check up on my family every now and again for me? I’d really appreciate it. They shouldn’t get into any trouble, I never talked about that guy I thought was my boss (the name I have is likely fake anyways).

When they walked me to my cell for the first time they had a guard walking next to me on either side. Is that normal? You know me, I’m like one hundred and fifty pounds when I’m wearing my steel toe work boots. Yet here they had two big bulky guards for one of me for our short walk together. Last door on the left of the range.

They call the hallways that have all the cells ranges.

Range: like pasture for cattle, all us morons being corralled into cages like the dumb beasts we are. Herded to our identical little rooms with our identical uniforms and our similarly terrible bad decisions.

Range: like a shooting range for fish in a barrel.

In my barrel with me is a guy named Kal. He’s a lot bigger than me, that’s the first thing I noticed about him. He was doing pushups when I got into the cell. The second thing I noticed was his glasses, I’ve never seen glasses like that before. The lenses were perfect circles only the size of quarters and the black frames were curled like the head of a fiddle on the outer side of the lenses and then only held the lenses on the bottom half of them. If he hadn’t been doing pushups when I entered I would definitely have noticed that first, it was off putting seeing this big muscular man with these small quirky glasses. If you had described those glasses to me and then asked me to describe the kind of man I’d expect to be behind them I’d have said some skinny nerdy guy with his nose buried in a comic book and badly groomed facial hair. Not this huge clean shaven guy with a crew cut and veins in his biceps thick as twizzlers. He didn’t say anything to me, he just looked at me and gave a smile. A smile too big and held for too long.

He scares me.

Leave a comment