052/100 aka 192/365

OF PRISONS
Word Count: 345

Outside is a prison of the ash walls of the night. The air is thick with the day’s troubles. The screams of the people as the mornings have punched them with fists of reality, as their dreams have been shredded to wisps too tenuous to hang onto through the rest of the day. Their voices hang in the night like fog, coagulate in my lungs and I cough up a coating of mucus that makes speaking senseless, useless. Still, I move through the streets to a place with an H on the door.

The man in #15 is a drunk stumbling home after midnight stepping on cracks. His mother wails from the sky. His wife lies in their cold bed, waiting, dreading, whispering prayers to a God she doesn’t believe in.

Above them a mother tucks in her three children, holds her breath listening, hoping to hear the soft sleeping breath sounds so she can steal away to a place where nobody sleeps. She’s been a good watcher all day, absorbing the whining of wanting, the stomping of tempers, the howling of children just needing to howl. She sips from a bottle she keeps on the top shelf behind cereal boxes safe from the kids, as a good mother should.

A radio plays soft in a first floor apartment, a song never reaching anyone’s ears. A woman cries behind the closed door of her bathroom while her man snores on their bed, his rage dissipated, relieved, transferred into her.

I’m close enough now to gag on the soup that is home. I look up and up where the buildings disappear into the night where the moon only crosses the street. Someone cries out from a window where bars can’t hold in despair. It leaks out and expands into the air between windows and lives, a silent scream that explodes in the mind.

I take a last deep breath of the stillness and pull myself up the stone stairs. The days are a stain you can never wash off. The lacquer of night seals it in.