Fiction
The immediacy of it all surprised him: not even a day with Sophie and Joseph, not even an hour to say good-bye. One embrace—he felt her shaking—and then it was shackles and away . . .
He wasn’t long at the Hanna jail. They must have wanted him out of there fast.
He’d had that cell at the bottom of the courthouse to himself since the arrest. Counted every brick a dozen times over and then some; counted them every night to get to sleep, starting at the north wall. He recognized the buttery color of the Hanna brickyard. The front of the cell was all iron bar. He tested each one, giving it a shake; windows, too. The metal was well set into the walls and floor.
Were his tools still at the roundhouse? Would they give them to Sophie now? They were his tools, fair and square. He’d made every one of them. His, fair and square, no matter the verdict. Maybe Dr. Harris could help.
They put him on the three-thirty train. Aldercott was a good two hundred miles away. Sophie wouldn’t be able to come more than a time or two, if that . . .
He was mostly lucky that he got to keep a notebook and pencil: only pocket size, not a regular one, but enough.
Not private, though. Right in front of them he had to number the pages—one, two, three, four . . . sixty—and show it to them every morning.
“Don’t want to be seeing anything subversive in there, Witala.”
And better not be a page missing or that was it.
“Don’t be passing any secret messages, Witala.”
What if that notebook was it? What if Sophie couldn’t send him another one? Sixty pages to last 184 days. Was that it: 184? He figured the months with thirty-one; that would make it last, just in case. He made a calendar first off, on the first page: tiny, tiny squares to count off the days. Then he marked each page into thirds. He’d make it last if he had to. Drawing only: engines and structures and tools, shrunk down, down, down in scale. No words to get him in trouble.
A single event connects and divides the lives of two men. “Going to war prompts some to make amends and confess and to set things right—that or keep the secret with them.” Published in Printers Row Journal, September 22, 2013. Runner-up for the Nelson Algren Award and a Top 25 story in Glimmer Train's March 2012 Fiction Open.
Caught between childhood and adolescence, a girl pays new attention to her family and discovers what has stayed hidden and unspoken.
Old photos merely hint at the lives behind them, as Anna Baird Ferguson’s story reveals.