The Prisoners by Cameron Pierce
The Prisoners
The correctional facility was made of pizza. It housed anorexic berserkers and the dripping of sauce and cheese was a constant torment to them.
The anorexic berserkers ate veal hamburgers for breakfast. They drank champagne for lunch. They stomached raw kimchee for dinner. They took scalded coffee with every meal.
One of the anorexic berserkers was a lumberjack. Another was a Dutch immigrant. Still another owned a gold mine. All were avid birdwatchers and free speech advocates.
One frigid winter, the correctional facility froze completely and caused a seven hour delay in the prisoners’ schedule. They awoke seven hours late, ate veal hamburgers for breakfast seven hours late, searched for loopholes in anorexic law seven hours late, played board games seven hours late, etc.
In some places, the pizza walls of the correctional facility were still frozen. Among some prisoners, there circulated rumors that a miracle worker in the form of a crow would someday spring from the frozen parts, breaking wide a hole that led to the outside world, and freeing the anorexic berserkers at last.
Not a single anorexic berserker could say how long they had been imprisoned, or how long their sentence was supposed to carry on.
Despite the absence of windows and outdoors, their avian interest held strong. The anorexic berserkers even slept and showered with their binoculars on, their water-logged Audubon guidebooks tucked neatly in the crux of their sunken rib cages.
And how they loved free speech!
Free speech impassioned them.
They read the Russians to fill their hunger. They read the Greeks to forget the dripping of the walls. They fingered their own assholes when the dripping of the cheese and sauce became too much.
Wednesday was game night. They unanimously preferred Life over Monopoly, but they voted on the game every Wednesday anyway. Since that mythic frigid winter, they finished tallying votes seven hours late. By then it was almost bedtime and they had to cut the game of Life short, without a winner, ever.
The prisoners dreamed of running, though they were too weak and frail to run. One among them owned a bunny. Whether it was the lumberjack or the Dutch immigrant, none could tell. The bunny may have changed hands nightly, or been no more than nasty rumor.
Over time, the correctional facility grew stale. The anorexic berserkers turned into gray skeletons and stopped living for hundreds of years at a time. Occasionally they got up and walked around, performing old rituals, still seven hours late. They never spoke except when prompted, and then only in guttural vowels that added up to nothing. Having lost their chance at freedom, speech meant nothing anymore.
They lived their dying days in a mountain of stinking cheese and molded sauce, and after crawling through so many centuries of rot, they were buried. But the anorexic berserkers kept on waiting for the miracle worker to save them from the ruined facility. Even though freedom meant nothing anymore, they watched for crows whenever they came alive, their binoculars wedged inside the pizza walls, seeing nothing but holding out hope anyway.
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Cameron Pierce is the author of Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island, and other books. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Barcelona Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Verbicide, Everyday Genius, Kill Author, Avant-Garde for the New Millennium, and many other publications.
Cameron also runs Lazy Fascist Press.
He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, dog, cat, and triops.