“Doghouse”

By Muhammad Drammeh

Being buried alive was the most terrifying thing I could imagine until today. It was the isolation that got to me. I guess I should be thankful in that respect. The bus is fully packed, guards at each end, and the color of dying autumn leaves bleeding past the peripheral and into the foreground. I only see the pant legs of our jumpsuits and shoddy shoes, his and mine. His eyes are too rough and piercing to make contact, but they all were, and so were mine. My skin isn’t much darker than that of the others, which further shackles us together. All of us, together in isolation, sworn brothers with hatred. Off to penitentiary, some for months, some for years of rehabilitation. It doesn’t really matter. We’ve always been here. We’re stuck. It wasn’t my first time here, the rattling and rolling of the wheels becoming almost comforting. I’d be released, and through some form of lunacy I found myself in a brief moment of triumph. But the world had long forgotten me by then. There was no place for me, no job for me in this alien thing. Its teeth gnashed and its eyes hated. The only submission was in the void. So I struck back. It was set alight. I boiled in its atmosphere. And now I’m here. Sooner or later, I’d see that thing again, and I’d again have to choose, that nothing of a choice, and then I’d be back. The penitentiary is all around me now. It was there when I was born and it never left, agile as it pounced through the bramble, watching, waiting.

I think I was 19 when it happened the first time. I’d loaded up my bag with what I thought was a month’s worth of supplies. They saw me. I ran. But bags and bottles, bits and pieces began to fall out and on the asphalt. My hand snaked to the bottom of my bag and I turned, gun in hand. It felt heavy and wrong in my hands. Like it was for someone else. I thought it worked. But the penitentiary smiled. I got 6 months for it.

I’m not scared of being buried alive anymore. I’ve already been buried, ten, one hundred times over. They try to heal us. But they won’t help us. Eyes clamped shut, they can only feed us to the penitentiary, slide our caskets into its wide, grinning maw. And once it is done with you, if it decides it is done with you, it spits you out and retreats into the shadow, and again it waits for you to choose. To continue the cycle, or break yourself in its gears. But the penitentiary needs you. So it can bloat, so it can feed on more and more of us, so it can wrap us in orange cloth and sink its teeth into our skin. It’s been getting stronger for a while now.

I can only feed it.