Snippet

The sink dripped slow and steady—drops of water counted off each second cold and calculated, like they had been programmed to grab each moment and hold it there temporarily: to be counted and filed in an overloaded part of my brain, with the specific intention of driving me crazy.

They were coming to let me out after two and a half years behind bars, and in spite of the promises and programs, and all the king‟s horses and men, they couldn‟t—and didn‟t—put me back together again. In fact, I was more broken than when we began.

The sun came through the window in the early morning, brilliantly. I turned to let it warm my face.

My six by ten foot space in the world was in G-Block of Connecticut‟s correctional institution on Jarvis Street in Cheshire: A new prison which housed younger inmates, whom they tried to reform. The cells were bigger, and the food was better than the old Cheshire building or the big boy prison in Somers, and it wasn‟t overpopulated, so life was tolerable. We had training programs, doctors and psychiatrists, and they gave us medication and therapy in an effort to reach one of us before it was too late.

I stood and stared out the window, at the robins digging in the yard. "Any time now," I said, "Any time now."

What the people with the keys didn‟t know is that they were letting go a monster: that for me it was already too late. As the clock ticked, and the faucet dripped, and time passed by—all I could think about was murder.
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