The electric doors slid open with a ‘whoosh,’ the buzzer signaled that an inmate was coming through. After a few minutes of scuffling, a trio emerged from the door. Two prison guards were half dragging-half carrying their prisoner. The hand cuffs were heavy on his arms, stretching the muscles painfully. His feet felt as if they were weighted to the cement ground by invisible forces. When they finally brought him to rest in a hard wooden chair he let out a sigh of relief and forced a smile. He lazily cracked his neck and knuckles, releasing pent-up tension.
“Who is it this time?” he asked, turning to the guards with a cocky sneer on his face. The one prison guard rolled his eyes and looked away. The other kept his face blank. Knowing he was getting no response from either guard, he faced the glass window, patiently awaiting his visitor. He bathed in the sounds of the other inmates talking to their guests, the pens scratching on paper, and the slow ticking of the clock nearby. Slowly he rolled his head back, resting his eyes for a moment and replaying the past day’s events in his head. The air was thick with happiness and sorrow from the other inmates and their visitors.
After a few minutes of waiting the dull shuffle of a person could be heard from the other side of the Plexiglas window. The man opened lifted his head and the visitor was unveiled to the convict’s eyes. He let out a gasp of surprise at the face of the woman behind the dirty glass. At that moment his cocky façade was thrown out the window. The presence of this woman shocked him utterly. He slowly reached for the phone at the same time his guest did.
With sweating palms he hesitantly spoke into the phone, his voice quavering, “Mom?” he said in a shocked half whisper. The woman just nodded at him solemnly and paused a bit before speaking:
“I’m so disappointed with you John,” she said pursing her lips, “I leave you alone for four years and this is what you go and do with yourself? Shame on you, I thought I raised you better than that. Am I a bad mother?”
“No ma, not at all! You’re a great mother, of course you raised me well! I’m real sorry, I really am,” he pleaded with her over the phone, her eyes boring holes into him from behind the glass. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Sorry won’t help you now, son,” she scoffed. “This is one hole you can’t dig yourself out of.”
Softening her gaze, she said, “Murder is a serious thing. Taking someone else's life just isn’t right.”
“Will you help me out?” he asked her, his eyes pleading with her from behind the glass.
“Not this time, son,” she answered him quietly, voice barely audible over the prison phone. “The set bail is too high for me to pay. Besides, you have to face the consequences of what you did. I can’t bail you out every time.”
“You’ve got five minutes left!” a voice barked sharply from somewhere behind John. His head whipped around to see that not-so-nice guard sneering at him. John scowled in return and faced his mother again. The hums of the other prisoners' voices were irritating him now. He started shaking his leg in a spate of nervous energy.
“What would it take for you to not love me?” John asked, holding his breath to hear his mother’s response.
“Probably this,” she replied, letting out a long, pent up sigh.
“Do you still love me mom, even after all this?” he asked desperately, but at the same time challenging her. His mother paused, fixing her skirt and staring off into the distance. After a long moment of silence she finally spoke.
“John,” she said exasperatedly, “you were the best son a mother could ask for when you were younger. It was so hard raising you without a father figure around. I tried to discipline you to the best of my abilities, I tried to give you the best education available, and I trusted you. You always listened to me. Even when you were a teenager you were my little angel,” she paused to dab at her eyes. John was watching her every move tensely. “I remember when you were really young, around five, I used to count to three. Remember John? If I got to three you knew to expect grave consequences.” His mother started laughing gently. “You’d look at me with these big, glassy wide eyes as soon as I hit the number two and then immediately stop what you were doing. You were so good it almost hurt me. You were my pride and joy, my only child and the light of my life.” At this point tears were flowing freely from her eyes, almost to the point where she was in hysterics. “You never let me get to four. Never, Johnny, never.”
“Time’s up, buddy!” the guard said, walking over to John. In response he snarled at the guard, his eyes turning wild with a hint of blood lust in them. The guard took a hesitant step back and stuttered out a sentence, “I’ll give you two a few more minutes.”
The convict whipped his head back around facing his mother. His knuckles were beginning to turn white, he was clutching the chair handles so tightly. The ticking of the clock was starting to drive him mad. “What now?” he asked, staring at her intently, his eyes almost overflowing with mixed emotions.
She stared down at her lap, her hands folded neatly in the center. You could see tiny wet crystals flowing from her eyes, carelessly coming to rest on her dress. When she looked back up at him, her eyes had grown cold and her gaze was steady. “Four,” she said weakly as she slammed the phone down on the hook. She stood up to leave and gathered her belongings. When she had smoothed out her skirt and fixed her shirt, she was gone in the turn of a heel. She never looked back as she walked out the door.
As he watched his mother retreat through the door, his heart began to sink. He let the phone hang carelessly off the hook, not even bothering to hang it up. He slowly stood and pressed his hands up against the dirty glass without saying a word. It was as if the whole world had slowed down. It was just him and that infernal clock. In a heartbeat it was as if something in him snapped. All he saw was red. He would later say he remembered nothing of knocking out the guard or breaking the chair. He would later say he thought he heard himself screaming profanities, some causing the women in the room to blush, but he couldn’t remember clearly. All he did remember was that he had just lost the last person who had ever cared for him in his lifetime.
-one week later-
A prisoner was found dead in his cell at a local medium security prison. The warden says it was a suicide, and the autopsy confirmed it. The inmate’s psychologist however believes he was dead long before he stepped off the bucket, the only thing that was keeping him from dying. He says that he died of guilt and a broken heart.
