Father Figure
 

I watched as the guards strode away from the holding cell. Laughing, they told jokes and found each other funny. I'd known going in, that the risk of getting punished was there. No longer did I have faith that this could never happen here. I could hear the sounds of the others down the corridor. The fragile, with their rasping, mouth breathing, that huddle on their piss stained mattresses. The angry counting the ways they would kill their captors, if they believed in killing. The tragic who were never meant to be here at all, recounting the ways their lovers had betrayed them in the name of the Father.

I arrived on a cold bleak day in April. The winter had been harsh and unforgiving, dumping one storm upon the other in the area. They claimed I had killed her, but I couldn't remember a thing. They had found her beaten bloodied body in a snowdrift behind the ice skating arena. I sat there slack jawed as the evidence was trotted out before me by a sharp nosed prosecutor who would always turn to look at me, lick his lips, and smile like he knew it was a lock. My lawyer, an inept sloth, who never raised his voice beyond the monotone gift God had given him, shrugged his shoulders and patted me on the back as they took me away.