Third Saturday Fiction

Chapter 2. Miguel Castro Maximum Security Prison, from the novel Far Stone

By Steve Glossin

[Editor’s Note: The opening chapter of this unfinished novel was published here on January 16.]

The 2x3 meter cell was the prisoner’s private black abyss when he lay down and let his mind wander to other places and times...A smothering coffin when his rage over betrayal and failure made him want to scream and beat his fists against the walls – but never did.

   The naked bulb that hung in the hallway had been extinguished hours earlier. It made little difference to the prisoner. The few glints of light that seeped through the steel door’s seams showed him nothing he hadn’t committed to memory during his first few days in confinement. The floor, walls, and ceiling were cinder block incarcerators that had long been caked with graffiti – prayers, curses, and pleas – scratched into the stone with whatever makeshift tools previous prisoners could use…or in blood from broken fingernails when nothing else was available.
    The prisoner sat on a slab of cold concrete that was the cell’s sole piece of furniture. The slab had been his bed for nine months as a guest of the state-run hotel known as Miguel Castro Castro Maximum Security Prison, in Lima, Peru. The stench rising from the hole in the floor that was his toilet was the only perfume he recognized other than the sweat and cheap cologne trailing the guards when they made their rounds. Or when they shoved the slop they called food through the hinged slot in the center of the steel door, twice a day…when he was lucky.
    He had no calendar or watch, but the routine was etched in his mind as were the days of the month and hours of the day. Each Wednesday he stuck he head through the door’s slot and a guard would dry shave his beard and occasionally clip his coal-black hair. Once a month he was escorted to the shower where he got a sliver of soap and ten minutes of cold water, but never with other prisoners – always alone.
    At night he could make out the uttering of Christians imprisoned in a connecting cell block – praying for deliverance to whatever God had deserted them or begging for mercy from their beatings. Another wing held members of the Shining Path, who endured their misery stoically and whose voices he could hear chanting odes to their cause.
    He was an isolated inmate in a sea of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, in an overcrowded prison. The twelve cells in the block where he was held were empty except for his. The sergeant of the guards would make his weekly walkthrough tonight and the prisoner waited patiently with a question.

Copyright © 2015 by Steve Glossin