CYCLED SENTENCE - PART 3

SEGREGATIONS

“Mr. Blake, we will take your testimony into consideration and have made note of your excellent behavior.  Your cooperation is greatly appreciated and we will make our decision known to you within the next thirty days.  Until then, do you have any last words for the committee?”

“Yes Sir.  Dear Honorable Members of the Parole Board, your time and attention is truly appreciated.  I can assure you that if you should grant my parole, that I will dedicate the rest of my life to repaying my debts to society.  I know that I can never take back what I did, but with your decision, maybe I can contribute to something new, something good.  Thank you.”

“This concludes our Parole Hearing of Walter Blake, inmate number 0032186.  We will now take a lunch break and meet back here in one hour.”

****

What’s an hour?  By the time these goons get back from their lunch, I will have lived hours within their hour. Time is all I have now, so much time that I find time within time.  I can count seconds within a second and live days within a day.  Paradoxically, I can sleep for minutes and weeks pass just the same. With no clear direction, for all I know, thirty days from now might actually be yesterday.  For me, time is an hourglass of sand in the temper tantrum hands of a screaming toddler.

This is my third time up for parole, and I can honestly say, I would take death by electrocution over having to go into that room of dodos one more time.  They make me feel like a god damn dog getting its nose rubbed in the heaping shit it just took on their white carpet.  Every time they rub my nose in shit and then send me back to my kennel.  My freedom is in their hands now. Come to think of it, it’s always been. 

I’m not the only one. It’s all of us. They’ve got you all on leashes of various lengths and degrees of slack, and believe you me; the second one of you even thinks about shitting on their white carpet, it’s off to the dog pound.  They’ll stick you in a kennel and rub your nose in shit until you learn to do their tricks or die. The part that fucking gets me the most is that we willingly pay taxes to build our own kennels, under the delusion that they are only for the strays.  

Anyway, now that I’ve rolled around in my analogy a bit, let me get back to the dickheads that got me started on all of this; the assholes that wouldn’t last one day in this hell. The dickheads and assholes that can go get fucked!

 I imagine that right about now they are out to lunch, stuffing their stupid fat faces with pastrami, chips, and diet coke. This is sure to be followed by a circle jerk up and down the chain of command, until it’s time to clock out and go home. Upon arriving to their caves, they will slap the days bacon down on the table, strip out of their hunting attire, and slip into their vices.  After a meal of two parts meatloaf, six parts beer, they will then fuck, beat, or ignore their wives and children, all to the anthem of Monday Night Football.  Off to bed.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.

 It is only my instinctive urge to survive and copulate that brings me to whimper and beg to such cowardly men.  Men with so much freedom, if it were cash, they would wipe their asses with it.  Freedom that I protected under fire and blood, flushed away in the afterthoughts of the spoiled and mundane.  Though I must beg to these bastards, my dignity remains intact under the pathetic façade, knowing at least that my freedom and incarceration were well earned. 

Obviously my freedom prior to my crime was earned during my time in the war, but my incarceration, not so easily.  It’s not what I did that put me into prison, but what I did to survive once I was behind bars, that earned my place in the house of pain.  Thinking back now, I choke on the irony of it all.  I went from being a professional killer of Nazi scum, to eventually being surrounded and under the protection of a growing neo-Nazi movement. 

Once the late 60’s rolled around, it was almost impossible to be white and not a skinhead in the federal prisons of America.  Believe me, I held out as long as I could.  There was no race or group that I hated more than Nazis, especially American Nazis.  I tried to go under the radar and avoid any affiliation with the skinheads, but it was the niggers that eventually forced me out of hiding and in search of security.  Trust me, if the blacks would have accepted me, or even just let me be, I’d probably still be killing Nazis to this day. 

**** 

If you take a Styrofoam cup and place it over burning toilet paper, it will melt into a cone.  If you keep melting more Styrofoam and adding it, it will strengthen your cone.  If you then grind and file that cone into a sharp point, you will have yourself a proficient tool for stabbing the shit out of somebody. This is how the nigger that tried to kill me made his shank.   

I was doing pull ups on the bars in the yard when from behind, my weight was lifted by two big black arms.  A big nigger had me by the waist, then another that had his pants down like a punk, rushed me from the front and proceeded to batter my guts like bread.  My blood soaked abdomen provided just enough lubrication to slip like a fish from the big niggers arms. What I did next, would be my defining moment in prison as a mean mother fucker. 

CYCLED SENTENCE - PART 2

                                                

                 VICTIMS AND CASUALTIES

 “He did it in cold blood.”  As if to say that I was as mindless as a reptile, only acting on some monster like instinct.  Another example of delicate language, in this case, designed to convey that my actions were subhuman, or at least beyond the rational, warm blooded virtues of modern men.  This label only works for killers of victims, of course. Killers of casualties are to be filed under a different label, laminated with a moral acceptance, but only if the killing is done in the service of god and country.  

During my shell shock vacation in France, I was a maker of casualties.  I had a knack for turning blonde haired, blue eyed German boys into hamburger for the worms.  I once kicked open a latrine door to find a pretty Nazi taking a shit for Hitler. He put one hand out while covering his small fascist dick with the other.  “Nein, nein, ne…”  I wiped his ass with lead and thought nothing of the fact that he was armed with only a roll of toilet paper. 

Turns out he was an SS Sniper with enough kills to open a small American graveyard in Normandy.  I think about the endless hours he must have spent, perched in a bell tower, or concealed on the balcony of some French bakery.  Never moving, never giving up his position, even if it meant defecating in his uniform and lying with the mess for a week.  I don’t know how or why he left himself so exposed and defenseless that day, but the outcome would result in two makers of casualties, one dead on the shitter, the other with a medal from Uncle Sam. 

The only thing that made us any different was the symbols on our sleeves.  His just happened to be the one that meant, “Kill this mother fucker!”  Then again, mine probably meant the same to him.  It was his symbol that made killing so easy for me.  What it stood for, all that it represented.  I figured that any man that would bare a fucking swastika must be a supporter of genocide and a breeder of hate.  

It was this very symbol, the banner of all my war casualties, which would bring me to take my first victim.  It happened almost thirteen years after the war ended. Enough time to make the thought of killing a man seem hard again. Then, with the simple act of unveiling a greenish black tattoo from behind a red paisley bandanna, I saw “Kill this mother fucker!”  A fist sized swastika across his Adams apple, might as well have been a target that read “Stab here.”  

He didn’t know it at the time, but he had just made himself as assailable as an unarmed Nazi taking a shit behind allied lines.  There are days when I feel bad about the men I killed in war, but not even one second of carving new breathing holes for that jackass brings me any sorrow or guilt. I don’t know how I know this, but the bastard deserved every second of it and I don’t regret turning him into a victim.  If only I would have realized that by sentencing him to death, I would be sentencing myself to something much worse.

****

With the judgments of man, Hell is sure to follow.

CYCLED SENTENCE

This is the beginning of a short story I'm "attempting" to write. I have a basic idea of what my story is about, but so far, I've only written these first few paragraphs that you are about to read.  I figured I would do it in small segments at a time and just post them on this blog as I progress. At anytime I may go back and edit or change parts. To all of you real writers out there, please forgive my sacrilegious attempts of dabbling in your sacred art. To everyone else, please bare with the slaughter of grammar that I lay out before you. Feel free to call out my mistakes and help me improve. You will quickly find that I have no idea as to what to do with these ( , ) those ( ' ) or that ( ; ). Thanks.

CYCLED SENTENCE

BY

LANCE INKWELL

           

I stabbed a man to death when I was 28 years old; four times to the throat with a blood rusted, stuck open switch blade.  The papers called it a “Random Act of Violence”.  Though, when it comes to a man killing another man, it’s hard for me to accept that delicate type of language.  I always felt that “Slaughter” or “Mutilation” would be more fitting for my headline.

 Random, is to suggest, without reason or purpose. As if there was no objective to my violence. As if I had no conscious decision behind my assault of jagged iron into vulnerable flesh.  Sure, I didn’t know the guy.  I didn’t care. And it wasn’t like I woke up with an itch to kill that morning either.  To any outsider, I suppose it may appear that I was just a random guy who randomly went psycho on some poor random bastard.

Well, I’ll tell you something right now. When you go as far as dancing on a man’s chest, just so you can hear the discord music of vital air, as it whistles through the gashes in the bloody throat flute that is his neck, you and him both will know, there’s not one goddamn thing that’s random about it. No, there was nothing random about that son of a bitch being turned into a musical instrument of death, or me being the devil that played it. 

It’s been three decades now of him in the dirt and me in a cell. Had he never took his bandanna off back at that diner, had he just left it around his fucking throat, I would have never seen it.  It would have never triggered the killer in me. That symbol, the second he exposed it, it was clear to me. He was the enemy and he must die.  

CHIPS AND DIPS

Overheard conversation between two men at a Chinese restaurant:

"I seen on Facebook that they are gunna start putting  microchips in people soon."
"I saw that too!"
"Yeah, I guess it's so the government can track our location from space and some shit. Anywhere we go, they'll be able to track us. It's bullshit! That's an invasion of our rights."
"Who in the world would want that? You couldn't pay me to do that. I don't want people knowin' where I'm at."
"Well the article said that you would be able to buy shit with it like it was a credit card."
"That's fucking crazy! No thanks. I'm doin' just fine without it."
"Same here. Let's mosey."

Both men put on their jackets and grab their iPhones from the table.