Yard Time

This one is inspired by a song that I enjoy.
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Tad kept his head down as the guard floated by, and he kept his thoughts clear for good measure. Or tried.

“Don’t think of escaping, don’t think of escaping, don’t think of escaping.” he mumbled to himself.

How did they float? Tad couldn’t float. If he could, he wouldn’t be here, that was for sure…

A shadow fell across Tad’s bare feet, blocking the yard-time sun.

He had been thinking again, and about escaping.

It didn’t speak, the floating robe, because it didn’t have a mouth. Or a head. Just a sticky red patch, always wet, where a neck should have been. The red wet stain on the neckless shoulders was looking at him, he knew it.

The cloth was yellow, but not with dye. It was age, and stains, stains from who knew what. Stains from the wet spots on the beds of young children. Stains of fear. Broken by the sticky red absence of neck. And held together at odd angles by black stitches, stitched like sewn up wounds.

Not that Tad looked. Not that Tad ever looked.

Tad stayed there, frozen, and knew it knew his thoughts. It started moving again, Tad saw by the shadow. Started moving closer. He thought of running, but another of the inmates pointed in his direction and shouted words he did not know.

Tad was in a cage then. He didn’t go to the cage, he just was there. How long had he been here, in this prison? Light streamed down his wide and tall room, but he didn’t know from where. And the cage ceiling prevented him from trying to see. It was too short to stand up. Not out of necessity, for nothing was occupying the space above or around the cage. It was, because it hurt.

Since coming here, Tad existed to hurt. He was a god of pain, he knew it so well. He was authoritative on the matter. Volumes could have been written from his expertise on suffering.

Since? It had been different once, hadn’t it?

“When was it different?” he asked his empty cage.

No reply came.

He kicked out at the wall of the cage, and it bent where his bare feet had been.

“Hello?” He crawled forward and felt the bent metal. It was solid, thick, real. And yet, bent all the same.

“Is this real?”

No answer.

This is what they did, the guards. They played tricks on you. Made you think you were getting out or that there was a way, and the next time Tad kicked, it would rip his skin open.

Tad was a god of pain, experiencing it endlessly, forever and ever.

How did the other inmates read his thoughts? He accepted that the guards could know his mind, but the fellow on the prison yard had alerted the guards even before he ran, when he had thought of running.

Tad looked up. The top of his cage was lower. It had changed when he wasn’t looking. He could do no more than sit, now. All for a thought, an idea of preserving himself.

“They’ve broken me.” he told the empty space, and he kicked the cage wall again.

The metal ripped from the frame, separated, and left a hole in his cage. Another trick. He would go out, and be in just another cage, a smaller one.

He stared at the hole in his cage, watched it.

A scraping noise, metal on cement, broke the silence. The cage wall he’d kicked off was dragging itself toward him. It moved like it thought. Everything thought, here. And it all thought like Tad, like all the things he was afraid to think of.

“Damn you!” he shouted, and inched backwards, tighter against the cage wall behind him.

The metal piece started to rise, to bend itself in knots around the jagged edges of the broken face metal, twining itself back into place, screeching like it hurt itself to move, but it did it anyway, to hurt Tad. A piece of jagged twining metal reached out for his bare feet while the rest reattached itself.

Tad pushed back hard away from it, and the cage wall behind him ripped free. Another hole. Tad climbed out of it to get away from the moving wall.

He was out of the cage. The new broken piece began to pull itself toward him. The first piece began untwisting itself again.

Tad turned and ran, to throw himself against the cement wall of the room that held the cage. To claw at it.

When his weight met the cement wall, the bricks and mortar came apart and flew outward. Sunlight streamed in, filtered through the dust, and he was blinded. The noise of two pieces of metal scraping along the floor still sounded behind him, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw the prison yard ahead.  He stood between worlds of light and dark.

The yard was filled with hundreds of guards, shoulder to shoulder, looming and filling his field of vision. The sound of wet cloth crumpling echoed across the yard as all the shoulders shifted, and all the red spots looked at him.

But he was out.

“How am I out?”

In unison, as though of one mind, the guards began to move. There was no queuing or clearing as the ones in front made room for others to move. They all moved together, like a hundred fingers on an unseen hand, driven by a single mind. They moved toward Tad.

Metal touched his heel, one of the pieces of his cage; Tad jumped away from it. Into the nearest guard. Its cloth felt coarse, like dirty canvas, and its black prickly stitches scratched him. He pushed against it, and it came apart, falling to heaps of cloth like stripped flesh, hanging on his arms and hands, heavy, and slowing him down.

Tad was surrounded, but he just wanted them not to touch him any more. He shoved with both arms, throwing reams of cloth this way and that, putting his weight into each push, until, dazed, Tad saw that he was up to his waist in stained sticky cloth, and he pushed and waded until he stood on gravel again.

Tad looked, and saw a small sea of cloth and stitches, and behind him, his prison in rubble burying all the pieces of his cage. Somehow Tad’s thrashing had destroyed all.

“Is this real?” he asked the yard, the sun, and the gravel.

No answer.

He was a god of pain.  He had been since… when?  Forever?

The guards liked to play tricks on him.  Maybe this trick had gone on for years.  Maybe he had always had the power to escape, and that was their joke, their game.  Like the elephant tied to the stump that it remembered being unable to remove, Tad could have been free at any time.

And maybe they could take the power and subsequent freedom away.

“It’s a trick,” he told the dusty sunlight.  Tad would appear in his cage again, and it would be smaller.  He started to go to the rubble, to place himself in its confines again.  And then he thought.  He thought and thought, and then some more, letting himself think, and he didn’t keep his thoughts off escaping.

How did the guards float?  Could he float?  If he could, he wouldn’t be here…

Tad lifted his chin, bent his knees, and pushed the earth away from himself with his bare feet.  He watch the ground grow simpler and simpler, and the rocky hills became little mounds of earth, flattening into the curvature of the far away world below him.