The past two summers, I challenged some of my students to help me with some columns over the break. They gave me the first and last lines of a potential fictional short story. My task was to take those lines and write the middle. It was a lot of fun, so I’ve asked my students to help me again. This week’s inspiration was provided by Sawyer Prigge.
It was a regular day in prison when, all of a sudden, the ground beneath my feet started to shake. Now this wouldn’t have been so bad if I wasn’t in the middle of my squatting routine in the weight room, with roughly 400 pounds on my shoulders.
You might think, “Here’s some dumb crook, trying to bulk up in prison so he can commit crimes again when he gets out.” That’s awfully stereotypical of you, you know. Not all of us are in here because we’re horrible people. Yes, I made a mistake, trying to embezzle that money to help pay off my college loans, as well as some gambling debts I’d incurred trying to pay off said loans. But I’m trying to better myself while in here.
There’s really not much to do in prison. We sleep, eat, watch some tv, and exercise. I came into prison weighing about 200 pounds. I wasn’t in the best shape, but I was no slouch when it came to pick-up games of basketball or football. Still, I’m a competitive guy and found myself at the mercy of some really strong inmates. Wanting to get stronger and better at these sports, I started a workout regimen about a month into my three-year sentence. I’ve been working out regularly for over a year now, which explains why I’m considered advanced on the squat bar.
So anyway, the ground was shaking. We are situated in California, so it’s not as if this is uncommon, but I had yet to feel an earthquake while I was in stir. I’m sure there had been some minor quakes over the last year or so, but the prison was reinforced to withstand most common ground quakes.
I quickly let the bar and weights roll down my back and jumped forward, letting the 400 pounds crash to the ground safely behind me. Around me, other inmates were looking around, wondering how severe this might become. We had been told that, in case of an earthquake, we should stay where we were at the time, and the guards would guide us in case we needed to find another, safer area.
Otis, the guard near the door, acted quickly. “Inmates, line up here and follow me please. We need to move to a different location.” As I said, most of us aren’t in here because of mindless violence, so we were quick to respond to Otis’ directions. As we followed him down a few hallways, I realized we were in a part of the prison I hadn’t seen before. Where we had gone left, I always went right as soon as I left the weight room.
We found ourselves in an older part of the facility. The room we stopped in was rectangular and bare, nothing to fall off a wall or ceiling if the shaking resumed. As soon as I noted that, we felt another quake, this one stronger than before. As I looked around, I could see some fear glinting in eyes, including Otis’ dark blue ones. “O-okay, just st-stay calm,” he tried to say over the top of our increasingly loud voices.
The ground came to a rest once again. An audible sigh of relief sounded from all of us. Otis put his radio to his ear to hear something, and it was not hard to tell the news was not good. He spoke into it, but I couldn’t hear what he said since everyone was talking at once. One of the inmates, Aaron, was a little kooky anway, but he started shouting, showing off his nescience. “They’re trying to get rid of us, kill us all!” he yelled. “It’s a conspiracy to put us down.” Everything was a conspiracy to this guy: aliens were experimenting on humans, George W. Bush planned 9/11, we’d never landed on the moon, etc. Total nutjob.
It didn’t take much to shout Aaron down so Otis could fill us in. “Okay,” Otis said, looking around at all of us and looking panicked, “it seems like the earthquake damaged parts of the prison. We may be stuck down here for a while. They need to dig out some collapsed walls.” As the murmurs rose, he quickly added, “But they should get here in a few hours. We’re safe until then; just remain calm!”
Well, that was going to be a problem. We were used to being locked up in small spaces, but putting a bunch of inmates together in one of those small areas could get problematic, especially with Aaron here. He kept ranting about the government trying to take us all out. Yeah, because a guy who embezzled $50,000 is pretty dangerous to the government.
Otis was as good as his word, much to both his relief and ours. It took about three hours for us to get the word we could leave and head back toward the weight room and then the way we usually took to get back to the cafeteria. However, in that three hours, we’d heard about every conspiracy ever created, plus a few more. “Come on, Aaron, let’s go,” said Otis as the rest of us trudged back toward relative “freedom.”
But Aaron was having none of it; this was all a trap to snare us. I shook my head and just kept moving toward the door. Otis sighed and decided to leave Aaron behind; he’d send someone else to get the lunatic later. As I headed down the hall toward supper, the last thing I heard was, “And that’s why the earth is flat.”
Word of the Week: This week’s word is nescience, which means lack of knowledge or ignorant, as in, “The man showed his nescience by always quoting a website that was known for its sarcasm about world events.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!