On prison, freedom, and redemption.
The first thing one notices is the chair. Comprised entirely of straight lines with minimal upholstery, it’s a chair designed for utility rather than comfort. On the seat is a device like a small heating pad on which I’m asked to sit and, in the polygrapher’s words, "take it easy," though neither of us believes…
In 2011 the author was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison for downloading child pornography. He was released in 2021 and now resides in Texas. For more than a decade he has written extensively about his experiences as a defendant, prisoner, and as an ex-felon and registered sex offender reentering society.
Clark smiled broadly, which was unusual for Clark. Prone to anxiety and depression, he often sat through our weekly sex offender treatment sessions wearing an exhausted, dour expression, as though his life were coming to an end and he’d sooner sleep through the last dreadful bits. But today he smiled—it was a rather handsome smile—and…
A flicker in the bottom corner of my eye, too quick to identify but slow enough to determine speed and direction. It’s source: the dried goods shelf where oyster and hoisin sauce cans are stacked in rows; it’s destination: the small, irregular hole at the baseboard behind the stove. Unperturbed, I continued sliding blocks of…
My neighbor died the day I moved into my apartment. This I learned from another neighbor, Dillan, who lives three doors down. She’d went by Charlie, he said, and added that she’d been very old, nearly ninety, and in poor health. She’d had a cat. This I learned not from Dillan but surmised myself from…
I heard a cry, injured and outraged, a cry so loud that in the profound silence that followed I could sense by its echo the precise size and shape of the darkened dorm room, the heights of its ceilings, the compositions of its walls, could count the number of soft bodies scurrying like mice past…
Summers in West Texas: The gym bulletin boards are plastered with diagrams of the human form, the head turned, palms forward, feet splayed, filled as a vessel with water, sixty-five percent full, to just below the shoulders. There are reminders to wear sunscreen, UV heat indexes gradating from blue to mauve, sophisticated charts specifying how…
When a corrections officer came by to pack up my cellmate’s belongings this afternoon, my first reaction was joy at realizing I’d have the cell to myself for one night. This, of course, is a euphemistic way of saying I’d be masturbating all night to cologne ads in GQ. I don’t mean to sound crass,…