The Walls Around Us (Nova Ren Suma) by Nova Ren Suma

Author:Nova Ren Suma [Suma, Nova Ren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2014-12-10T17:22:49+00:00

WE WERE EYE-TO-EYE

WE WERE EYE-TO-EYE at the door to my cell. Our cell now. Her eyes were brown, and deep; mine were brown, too, but I hadn’t looked in a workable mirror in some time, so maybe they’d changed. We met there in the doorway, staring at each other.

It was only a moment, but there was a flicker, some kind of connection, like the passing memory of having known each other before. Then it was snuffed out, like when the lights go down at night before we’re ready, and all we can do is make the hatch mark in the cinder block to show one more day served toward release, toward our new life. It was hoped we might have two lives—the way cats are said to have nine. This life we ruined, and another, for after.

She dropped her gaze first. Then she stepped aside for me, so I could enter.

She’d claimed D’amour’s top bunk and D’amour’s shelves. Her canvas slip-ons were where D’amour’s had been, in the tub outside the door, and her feet were socked and narrow and quite long. She’d already claimed D’amour’s only hook. Now it was her hook. Now we would breathe the same air. She would sleep to the sound of my heart beating, and I’d sleep to the sound of hers.

Neither of us had spoken. I should have gone first. Said, Welcome. Or something shorter and more cryptic, like Hey. Here was the moment to drop some wisdom from my three years, one month, and fifteen days of being incarcerated at Aurora Hills, but I kept it back. I’d tried to be helpful the last time, with D’amour. And look where that got me.

Besides, I had other things on my mind. The loss of my book cart. The transfer to the kitchen, which was noted and official now, listed under my name outside the cell. All the rest—the sense of what was coming—seemed so far away. It was a forgetting like a heavy door being closed. It would take a lot of effort to push it open.

I sat on my bottom bunk, curled my knees in. A job in the kitchen would involve spills and smells that were sour, rancid, sickening. There would be burns from oven racks and hot plates. Wrinkled palms from searing dishwater. I’d be pruned after every shift. I’d stink.

What there wouldn’t be were the books, the soothing sound as they cascaded open, a thumb flicked to give them a good, fast skim. There wouldn’t be a way to travel from wing to wing, listening. No wheels on the cart spinning, carrying the stories, the words.

I felt gutted. Alone.

Alone like in the interrogation room at the police station, when they didn’t bring me a glass of water, and they didn’t let me leave the table, and they said they had my diary, and they said they saw what I wrote in it, and I asked for my mom, and I asked who gave them my diary, and I said

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