A Familiar Word

How he hated the rancid smell of this place.

Prison Block D of Indiana State Correctional Facility must surely be the foulest smelling place in the world, thought Charles to himself. And yet he surprised himself when just moments later he realized that in a scant 24 hours he would give anything to be back in its damp miasma, to experience again the squalid familiarity of his cot on the steel bedframe and the raucous yells of his still-living prison-mates. Over the course of his 20-year tenure in what the guards cheerfully referred to as the “gloomatorium”, his disposition toward his living arrangements had steadily shifted from quiet tolerance to veiled aggravation to outright disgust. It was a strange and unsettling thought that he was actually capable of missing this wretched place.

A loud clang on the bars of his cell suddenly ruptured his reverie, causing him to involuntarily lift his eyes up slightly from the discolored concrete floor.

“You got a visitor, Chuck.”

He could see even at this low angle, the immaculate black of a loose, flowing material that uniquely identified his unexpected guest.

“I didn’t ask for no preacher”, he grumbled without lifting his eyes further.

“State law. You don’t gotta listen to what he has to say, but you gotta let him in for at least 5 minutes. That’s the deal.”

And before he could protest further, the heavy click of a key in a lock was followed by the ungracious rattle of the cell door sliding open. With his attention now fully upon the figure that would likely be the last new person he would ever meet, he observed a tall, lanky man dressed in priest’s garb carrying a simple cloth bag. Slowly, almost shyly he walked in and sat himself on the old wicker chair that had been rotting in the corner for some time.

“My son, do you know why I am here?” asked the man.

Charles stifled a sardonic laugh.

“Yeah I know why, but I thought you supposed to come tomorrow. I still got a day left in this hellhole.”

After a moment he added “And I ain’t religious neither. So you wastin your time over here”.

The priest removed a small black book from his bag and placed it upon his lap.

“The last rites I will perform for you tomorrow my son, if you wish me to do so. My job here today is to let you know that you still have a chance at life”.

At this, Charles’s eyes suddenly narrowed, as if he were squinting at the spoken words, trying to make sense of something utterly incomprehensible.

“What I mean by that”, continued the priest, “is that it is not too late to accept the lord into your heart. In so doing, you will not perish when you leave this earth, but will continue to live on forever, and I might add, in a much better condition than here” (the priest gave a furtive glance at the prison guard just outside the cell).

“Oh.” Charles returned his gaze to the floor.

“Yeah, I figured it was something like that. I ain’t interested. If there really was a God, he wouldn’ta let this kinda shit happen. I been stuck here damn near a quarter of my life while the real killer is out there laughin' and probly sippin’ on champagne”.

He sneered and punctuated his last comment with a wet shot of spit onto the cell’s floor.

“My son…”

“Stop it with that son shit man, I ain’t your son, or your cousin, or your homie. I don’t know you.”

His irreverence temporarily took the priest aback.

“Very well then, Charles…”

“If that’s all you came in here to say you can see yourself out right about now”, interrupted Charles again in an agitated voice.

“I understand Charles. However, I would like to leave you with one final word”.

Charles raised his eyes again, and thought he detected a miniscule, cold spark in the priest’s eyes. It was a look that seemed vaguely familiar to him, which he hadn’t noticed before.

“In this book which I hold in my lap, are many blessings and revelations. Even for one such as you, who must surely despair at the injustice in this world, I am certain that you can find some salvation. I will leave it here with you so that you may ponder your choice, and I hope (here he raised his voice slightly), that you may find within it a new lease on life”.

With this, the priest rose from his chair, gently placed the leather-bound book upon the seat’s wicker surface, and looked intently upon the prisoner before him.

Charles returned his gaze and felt again as if there were something familiar in it, although he could not explain where the feeling had come from.

“May you go with God”. The priest bowed slightly and Charles watched him leave through the open door, which promptly slid shut with a thud behind him. The priest’s steps echoed down the hallway for a few moments before disappearing in the low din of muttering and scraping that served as Block D’s permanent background noise.

After a moment or two, Charles’s eyes fixed upon the book that the priest had left behind. It was small but thick, with very fine pages, sealed together by an unmarked, solid black leather cover. A bible, he thought to himself. Although he had already determined long ago that God did not, and could not exist in a world as unjust as his own, he nonetheless felt a strange urge to pick up the book.

He did so and began casually flipping through its pages, checking for anything out of the ordinary - a highlighted passage or perhaps a hidden opening of some kind. He could not discover anything other than what he assumed was the usual text of a King James bible, organized into multiple books and chapters across an Old and New Testament.

In his mind he replayed the brief conversation he had had with the priest, trying to discern if there was any deeper meaning in the man’s words.

“…I would like to leave you with one final WORD”, he had said.

Was he supposed to look for a certain word? But which one?

“…In this book are many blessings and… REVELATIONS”. This phrase immediately called his attention.

He eagerly flipped to the back of the Bible, scanning through the pages of the final, eponymous book of revelations, in search of some clue. However, nothing which he read gave him any inkling of special meaning, nor could he find any fresh markings or symbols that might have been added by an external hand. He eventually closed the book, along with his eyes, and despairingly pulled in once more the rotten odor of his cell and its surroundings.

Suddenly he saw again in his mind the mysterious glint in the priest’s opalescent eyes when he had uttered the word HOPE, and experienced another abrupt rush of inspiration. Without knowing where to begin, Charles started poring through the words and lines, seeking any mention of the word “hope” that might point him in the direction of what he slowly began to believe could somehow be a way out of his desperate situation. Minutes piled into hours of determined scrolling with his eyes, yielding several instances of the word, but none that stuck out to him as unusual, until he eventually set upon a passage which instinctively resonated with him:

Proverbs 23:18

“Surely there is a future, and your HOPE will not be cut off.“

He paused upon reading this passage, then re-read it several times, groping in his mind for an alternate meaning.

As he sat there, his head barely containing the innumerable proverbs and prayers it had just ingested, he felt a sudden tiredness come over him. He got up to ask for the time but found that the hallway outside his cell was dark, which caused him some alarm, as he hadn’t heard the rough call of the guard’s “LIGHTS OUT!” that perpetually accompanied the end of each 24-hour cycle in Block D.

Had he been so absorbed in the Bible that he had simply ignored it? The mental fatigue he felt, together with a small but swelling sense of regret that his final hours had been spent clumsily, in vain, with his face in a book full of old and ultimately meaningless words, overcame him, and he collapsed on his cot, wishing for it all to be over. The lines and verses of the holy text he had immersed himself in circled around his imagination in endless repetition until he slowly entered unconsciousness.

A loud, piercing siren awoke him some time later.

“Morning, Chuck. Big day today”.

The guard’s nonchalance left Charles unfazed.

“I want lobster” was his immediate reply, followed by “no, two lobsters, and a steak”.

“Wish I could help ya out buddy, but we’re not doing last meal service anymore on account of the pandemic”.

“You gotta be fucking kiddin' me”.

“Nope, them’s the rules Chuck”, and the brazen guard walked off whistling some hopelessly cheerful tune.

For almost an hour Charles sat limply on his bed, recalling the events of the previous day and wondering if miracles also happen to nonbelievers, and if it were totally implausible that an angel might somehow scoop him out of his grim reality and into the warm embrace of justice.

A short while later the guard returned, this time accompanied by another man.

“Alright fatha, he’s all yours”, and the gate to his cell slid open with the same sickening clang as always, except for an imperceptible finality that was audible only to Charles.

“I have come to perform the last rites, my son”.

Charles raised his head as the priest entered the cell, searching his face and eyes for the mysterious glint that he hoped was not just the desperate imaginings of a man on the eve of death.

“I don’t need none of that. And I thought I told you to cut it out with the son shit”.

“I see, Charles. I thought perhaps you had changed your mind after reading what was in the book I left for you… But I see it did not have the effect I had hoped. In any case, I can spend a few minutes here with you if it will help comfort you before your departure”.

“My departure, huh?” he snorted.

“Nah, the sooner, the better. And I don’t know what kinda effect you HOPED it would have on me, preach, but I damn near lost my eyesight rippin' through that stupid… ”. Charle’s mouth became inanimate mid-sentence. A certain thought had just lit up in his mind, and it took him entirely by surprise.

“I got it”.

“I beg your pardon?” asked the priest.

“I know why you look so damn familiar to me”.

The Priest knitted his brow.

“And.. you, you’re not a Catholic priest at all, are you? There’s another reason you keep on callin’ me son. What are you really doin’ here..? what do you want from me?”

“I already told you Charles. I came here to give you a new lease on life”.

With this, the man’s eyes took on a subtly different hue and he reached over for the book which was lying facedown, carelessly half-open underneath Charles’s bed.

“Ah, I see that you did find what I had left for you, after all. Although perhaps you did not understand its full meaning”.

“I understand enough to know you’re the deadbeat dad who I never seen since the age of five. What the hell you doing here?”

“Well, you see, Charles… I’ve just come into some money. Being locked up in here I’m sure you haven’t heard anything about it, but I have many followers on the outside, and… it recently became known that you and I were related. I felt bad about how we’ve been cut off from one another, and I came to offer you amends... in the form of $20,000.”

“What the hell good is that gonna do me? I’m getting executed in 15”.