Prompt #221: Justice
Erik sleeps, and he dreams about metal.
In his dreams he is standing in the vast darkness that surrounds his plastic cell. He is levitating and he can feel the metal like a pulse in a blood, like an ache that has become a constant, welcome friend. It sounds like a symphony and it sings in his head, a chorus to which he knows all the words and a melody he knows by heart. He can feel metal in his hand, slick and smooth, warmed from his touch. He can see it under the lights as it twists and warps.
The worst thing about this prison is the lack of metal. Plastic is dead and lifeless. Erik is beginning to feel dead and lifeless, too.
There have been no visitors since Jean. The guards leave his food and turn away. They do not stay. Erik has not seen Agent Fielding in weeks, the pretty guard that looks like a Nazi and talks like a cowboy.
They are trying to break him, and he knows this. But their forced isolation and the rapidly deteriorating quality of the food, the lights that sometimes come on in the middle of the night for no reason--this is not the worst thing they have done. Each day he is there is a day without metal. Each day his fingers touch plastic and there is nothing, nothing. A static deadness where something alive should be. Something that is immobile when it should be fluid.
This is what it is like to be human, he thinks. How terrible it must be.
At night, he touches metal in his dreams. He hears it sing and he twists it to his will. And each day he awakens with it a half-remembered thing, the song an echo instead of a refrain.
The dreams are all he has of metal, now. And he would give them all away, every one, to dream just once of Anna.
In his dreams he is standing in the vast darkness that surrounds his plastic cell. He is levitating and he can feel the metal like a pulse in a blood, like an ache that has become a constant, welcome friend. It sounds like a symphony and it sings in his head, a chorus to which he knows all the words and a melody he knows by heart. He can feel metal in his hand, slick and smooth, warmed from his touch. He can see it under the lights as it twists and warps.
The worst thing about this prison is the lack of metal. Plastic is dead and lifeless. Erik is beginning to feel dead and lifeless, too.
There have been no visitors since Jean. The guards leave his food and turn away. They do not stay. Erik has not seen Agent Fielding in weeks, the pretty guard that looks like a Nazi and talks like a cowboy.
They are trying to break him, and he knows this. But their forced isolation and the rapidly deteriorating quality of the food, the lights that sometimes come on in the middle of the night for no reason--this is not the worst thing they have done. Each day he is there is a day without metal. Each day his fingers touch plastic and there is nothing, nothing. A static deadness where something alive should be. Something that is immobile when it should be fluid.
This is what it is like to be human, he thinks. How terrible it must be.
At night, he touches metal in his dreams. He hears it sing and he twists it to his will. And each day he awakens with it a half-remembered thing, the song an echo instead of a refrain.
The dreams are all he has of metal, now. And he would give them all away, every one, to dream just once of Anna.