The Prisoner Game
Javier Sandoval
Hissing of automatic contraptions. They execute
the cycle of leaf: severed roasted hackled, tobacco.
Crooked machines, like iron vultures, nip at their
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their necks into triangles of shadow. They corrode
with each crank but grind forth, and they ignore
the moment they’ll steam their last screech, twitch
with rigor mortis, and decay into rust, gurgling in
the yard. Steel cables creep all around, sparking
over slobbered oil, and crisscross this factory with
the shock-touch cobweb of the metallic Widow,
lurking near the rafters. It lures down, rattling its
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After months of twilight, the mill-mumble swamps
into our subconscious - it often lullabies us to slumber. So I startle not from the shop-noise, but because
she unchains me from her waist and scoots to the
end of our mattress, a special treasure in her hand.
Our bed used to wear a sheet, but our after-hour
ardor would wrench it from the corners and wrap
our bodies in it, drenched and claustrophobic. So
we tore it cold. Thick springs coil from the cushion
like snakes, meaning if we’re reckless, we scrape the
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In a daze, she tosses the object in her hand, a red
ball, into the murk.
“Are you sick?” I ask, clutching for her in this dark
drum of mindless motion.
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over the litter of hydrogen peroxide and Visine bottles, hospital gauze and box cutters, minimart plastic
30 Fall 2016
and liquor jugs. Her sight haunts about, manic.
Then it settles upon what hangs many bodies away,
many bodies above in the cobblestone: the only window. She moans toward the square moon.
“Vomit if you got to,” I say. “I can always mop it
later.” I sprawl behind her and kiss each lumbar
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squats there on the horizon of our trance place. “Do
what you need to do,” I say. “I love you too much
to care.” She slashes a hand to cut me short. “It’s a
nightmare.”
“What? To hold each other here away from everyone? That’s a dream to me.”
“No, I had a nightmare.”
“Let me guess,” I say, smirking. “Your mother heard
you with your vibrator then dragged you to confession again?” That dirty secret always makes us
cackle.
She tsks. “I was in a jail yard, guarding a ring of
death row inmates. They were playing some stupid
game.”
“You?” I ask with a chuckle. “You’re so skinny, I
worry you’ll randomly disappear. Poof ! What sort
of convict could you stop?”
“Quit the jokes. The game was absurd. One man
would point across the circle to another, who would
have to jump as high as his quads could launch and
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thud like a corpse being dumped. The rest stood
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smearing muddy tears across sharp cheekbones, or
smacking dirt from their chests into dust clouds that
choked their neighbors, or nursing wounded ribs
– when they grimaced to roll up their shirts: midnight-blue and bloodshot bruises. Point, leap shoulder-high, then face pl