Hunger

In prison, everyone's got stories. More often than not, they're bullshit. But when you spend twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours in an eight-by-fourteen cement box, there isn't much else to do. In the hole at Wallens Ridge State Prison, the stories were bigger, longer, and more full of shit than anywhere else.


War stories, people called them. From where he lay on his narrow bunk, Michael Fitzgerald—"Mikey Massacre" to the press—listened to his two downstairs neighbors swapping war stories through the vent. The primary means of communication in the hole was through the vent placed near the ceiling above the stainless-steel toilet-sink. Unless you wanted to wear your voice out shouting, you stood on the sink to speak into the vent. Each dusty shaft connected the two cells on the bottom tier to the two cells on the top tier. While an inmate only had three other people to talk to during his segregation, it was usually better than the oppressive boredom produced by isolation. Usually.


"So this bitch was tryin' to short me my money and I was like, 'Yo, bitch! Who you think you playin' with? This ain't no game—this real, bitch!'" Steve was saying.


"When she pulled that shit, you shoulda cut her face," Brandon squeaked excitedly. "Thatta taught her. I did that to some punk-ass dude once: he tried to tell me I owed taxes and I straight cut his ass!"


"Nah, man," replied Steve with practiced nonchalance, "I bitchslapped that ho onto her knees, told her she was gonna pay for her high one way or another. Man," Steve groaned melodramatically, "That bitch gave some bomb head!"


Mikey rolled his eyes. If they were to be believed, Steve was a self-made kingpin who controlled half the drug trade on the East Coast, while Brandon was a stone cold killer with at least thirty bodies on his name. If they were to be believed. In reality, Steve was a walking cliché, a trailer park wigger who'd gotten busted holding up a penny candy store to feed his meth habit. He stole most of his stories from old Breaking Bad episodes; the only hoods he'd ever been in were on his South Pole sweaters.


Brandon was no better: a garden-variety child molester who'd checked himself into the hole to avoid being victimized. To anyone over the age of twelve, he was about as dangerous as a box full of lint.


However, it was the unspoken rule in the hole that you don't call people on their bullshit; it just wasn't done. Let people tell the lies they probably wanted to believe themselves. Even listening to inveterate liars like Steve and Brandon beat silence. Most of the time.


If nothing else, it passed the time. Entertainment was scarce in the hole.


So on it went, the two wannabe badasses swapping bullshit until they got tired of standing on their sink. Not long after, the lights went down. Prison lights never really turned "off"; the bright fluorescents were just switched over to a single bulb after ten pm, leaving the cells just dim enough to sleep in.


Just as Mikey was drifting off, the voice of his next-door neighbor brought him back:


"Hey, Michael, you up?"


Mikey got up and got onto the sink, the cold metal a shock to his bare feet. "Yeah, Goat; what's up?"


Goat was a diehard born-again Christian. Mikey didn't know, and didn't care enough to ask, why he was in prison. Goat knew his cars and could hold a good conversation that didn't stray too far from the realm of possibility. That made him the only one on the vent worth talking to. 


"Have you given any thought to what we talked about last night?"


"Fuck's sake, dude, you're not gonna start in on that shit again, are you?" Mikey almost hopped off the vent. Goat had made a few less-than-subtle overtures in the last couple weeks, but the night before he'd asked Mikey pointblank about becoming "saved." Mikey wasn't interested.


"Michael, the papers said you're a Satanist. Drinking blood and sacrificing people and all that," Goat said. "You might have killed all those people, but I've never gotten the devil worshipper vibe from you."


"Aw, that was just some shit I did when I was a teenager," Mikey said, "Cut my hand and bled over a pentagram, sacrificed a few cats in Lucifer's Name, offered to sell my soul for money and women. All the stupid shit kids do. Nothing ever happened—he never showed up."


"Did you mean it when you offered to sell your soul to him?" Goat asked quietly.


"Are you kidding? Hell yeah, I meant it! If the Devil popped up in this cell and offered me the things I want, all the things I'm hungry for, he could have my soul!"


When Goat spoke again, his voice was heavy with pain. "You don't know what you're saying, Michael. The Devil isn't just some ghost story to scare little children. He's real, Michael, and if you're not saved, he'll be waiting for you in Hell when you die.


"I used to be like you, thinking shit don't stink and thinking I was untouchable. I thought I was the master of my own fate. Then I found out that we're all just pawns in someone else's game. We all serve, whether we know it or not, whether we want to or not. The lucky ones get to choose which side they serve on."


Mikey frowned. "What the fuck are you talking about, Goat?"


"Your soul, man," Goat replied, "I'm talking about your soul. Believe me, I'm not one of these clowns who came to prison and suddenly found religion, or became a Christian to avoid getting singled out. I got saved because I met him and learned how truly fucked we all are if we don't start picking our masters wisely."


"Met who?" Mikey asked. It was the deep-seated dread in Goat's voice, not the chilly air blowing through the vent that caused gooseflesh to leap across Mikey's skin.


"The Devil, Michael," Goat said solemnly, "Not metaphorically—literally. If you're willing to listen, I'll tell you something I've never told anyone. Then you'll see. You'll see."

Everyone's got stories, Mikey knew, and most of them are bullshit. But something in Goat's voice kept him from scoffing, some dreadful earnestness that went beyond the usual convict bullshitting another and trying to believe it himself. He seemed like an old war vet remembering the battlefield, where the bullets where flying and death was only ever an instant away.

Mikey was on a precipice. Listening to Goat's story might pull the curtain back on his understanding of the world and the way it worked. Or it could be just another war story. He could call Goat on this load of bullshit, get off the vent and never talk to him again.

But...

"Okay," he said, "I'm listening."

To be continued...