Shane Jones: Crystal Eaters

“Shhhhhhhhhhh,” she says to the closet.

The dog lets out a small yelp.

“Shhhh, be quiet.”

When Dad comes in he’s covered in sweat and his face is roasted. He doesn’t say anything, looks mad at first, then takes a deep breath that relaxes his jaw and he sits down on the bed the way all Dads do. But there’s a weakness to his posture that wasn’t there before. His left hand is stained yellow. Every home is using more YCL because of the heat wave and there’s been talk amongst elders of stockpiling yellow. Dad believes that the value of yellow will rise until it’s equal to red but no one else believes him. In his closet he has three denim jackets, twelve pockets total, all stuffed with yellow crystals.

“Remy?”

“That was the weirdest dream ever. It was like, more than a dream. Like I was sick or something. My foot hurts. I’ve been running in the mine and, I don’t know, it was more.”

“I’m not angry,” he says looking around the room, “just tell me.”

“What?”

“Remy, come on now.”

“Seriously, whaaaaaaaat.”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

The dog barks.

Dad leaps from the bed and in three steps reaches the closet and opens it. The dog jumps out and runs circles around his legs.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. He just came into my room after my nap. On my test I got a C minus.”

“We were going to try and hide him until your birthday. It was your Mother’s idea.”

In the presence of Dad, in the way the dog is revealed to her, Remy feels like she’s done something wrong, feels guilty, and she’s not sure why, other than this is how the family operates. He doesn’t acknowledge hearing her test score and she doesn’t wait for it to register.

“Dad,” she says. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Anything?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you hurt Adam?”

“Because.”

“Dad?”

“Anything.”

“Are you dying because Mom is dying?”

“What kind of question is that?”

She sits up. The dog jumps into her bed and licks her face. The yellow eye is dull and the black is shining. His gums look black and pink and chewed up.

“Last night I saw Mom crawling across the floor.”

“He likes you. She’s resting and everything’s fine.”

“You said I could ask anything.”

“And you did.”

“What do you name a dog after your first dog dies?”

All prison cells are decorated with the exception of Jackson’s Hole which is located behind the laundry room and has no lights, no running water, is four feet by four feet, and smells like chemical lavender. Imagination by the inhabitant is encouraged. The administration is proud to promote this fact to curious city residents who skim glossy magazines and blogs for prison gossip. Reports of creativity make the inmates more human to workers in cubicles who spend their days living in screens. When they read about a prisoner painting a mural of skeletons wrapped in roses on a wall in the courtyard where the inmates exercise, it’s not with fear, but relief and an odd sense of comfort and admiration.

Guards interact with the inmates in a friendly but reserved manner. Fights are occasional. By the low night level noise it seems everyone sleeps well. The administration is also proud of this detail and reports often to the press how calm the prison can be because a calm prison makes the inmates seem less capable of the terrible acts they are guilty of. For example, there is a man named DeWeese, housed on the upper level, who is Grade A. DeWeese is polite, rarely speaks, and volunteers shelving history books in the library. He gives blood every Monday, both drunk-tattooed arms exposed, his face a big warm smile blasting the nurse. Multiple pool owners watched from inside their homes as DeWeese performed what he is guilty of: drowning squirrels in paint buckets.

Pants McDonovan lives on lower level east, and from his cell bars sees the upper level where more than fifty villagers are mixed in with hundreds of city prisoners. Many of them wandered into the city because they were attracted by streetlamps, big buildings, festive music, a new way of life, a way to start over, but they couldn’t adjust. They slept nude on street corners, dipped their toes into crosswalks, pawned crystals in trash-lined bricked alleys without permits. An elderly man with long gray hair wearing blue shorts prayed for ten hours to a storefront of televisions on please-stand-by. At night he smashed out the glass and threw the televisions into the streets, the colored bars on the screen cracking to distant lines the color of iron. How many villagers are in the prison isn’t widely known, especially not to Pants who occasionally recognizes a depressed face hovering over macaroni salad during cafeteria hours, but he’s never tried to keep track. The village knows about their people being imprisoned. Makes them suspicious about the city’s intent.

New inmates are stuffed inside a briefing zone on the upper level covered with blue mesh before being moved into their cells. Often, they are heckled from the lower levels by everyone except Pants who only watches, feeling awful about seeing men being placed in here, sometimes unconsciously tapping his thumb and pointer-finger together in sets of ten.

Upper level inmates complain about the temperature. In the current heat wave sleeping is pretty much impossible and the administration has poorly addressed the problem by installing cooling vents to offset what is a serious design flaw. Prisoners throw cups, food trays, books, spoons, their shoes, their teeth, whatever will learn to fly, at a window they hope will one day break. The lower levels are cool, dry, a design-flaw-mystery, which agrees with Pants who consumes so much black crystal his body temperature runs ten degrees above average. Because the administration considers him an agreeable and mild-mannered inmate who possesses a crystal that the guards have taken a liking to (Grade A ) he’s in charge of laundry duties three days a week and allowed an extra shower with the heat turned up to a skin-reddening temperature.

Your cell is a reflection of your inner self .

McDonovan spent more time decorating his cell than all currently housed inmates combined. His mattress is cradled inside a hull of plastic branches. The headboard becomes an octopus when he’s on black crystal, and the ceiling a forever green that welcomes him in moans. He enters it. He peels back layers of forest as the ceiling breaths and he goes inside, splitting ferns. But as soon as he enters, he’s back on the bed. Drawings of black crystals on white paper hang on the walls all signed Love, Remy . The cement floor is the color of the dirt in the crystal mine — painted in an unusual, but allowed by the administration, “Universal Black.” White lights caged-in on the ceiling polish the floor with glare. A toilet is in one corner, a square sink adjacent extends from the wall, and a two-foot-deep closet without a door containing clothes and a white box completes the living quarters, the reflection .

A window allows Pants to view the ugly blocks of the city and a curved road called The Bend where people the size of fleas sweat and jog. Below The Bend, the cliff leading to the village.

You have done wrong, but you are an individual with choices and we allow you to be yourself here. You are an individual constantly becoming a better individual .

Tonight he studies his reflection in the window. If he concentrates hard enough he floats through his head and home, into what is childhood-him playing spit-tag with Remy, jumping on his bike as motorcycle, finger-shooting Remy as he pedals away in a dust cloud with Remy running, falling several times, crying, laughing, spitting on herself, Mom watching, standing with her arms crossed and clutching at her throat a necklace of ten yellow crystals. After the childhood him smokes into the sun, the bike turning to blue gas beneath him, everything becoming a runny liquid hiss over the ground, he’s brought back into his cell and wonders when Mom will write next, how is she feeling, how many does she have left.