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In the dark, the moonlight drives through the barred windows like ice, scrapes the dirty concrete floor of my cell. Where the light fades, the shadows grow and shift shape. I’ve pushed the remains of my bread-and-beans dinner into the farthest corner because of the rats. There have always been rats, for however long I have been here.

I kept track of the days and weeks, in the beginning.

My arms are gooseflesh and my balls feel permanently shrunk up somewhere around my waist. The thin wool blanket the guard gave me doesn’t help much. The back of my throat is thick with dust. The cot I sit on is lumpy and hard and stinks of (I don’t want to know).

Water drips down the corridor. I can’t see it; it’s just a memory from the last time they led me out of here. A rivulet from a roof leak or a busted pipe that I can’t see even with the halogens (always on, always blinding) in their steel cages strung at intervals along the ceiling. A rivulet from the ceiling, tracking the curves of the wall, pooling on the floor and stretching its dark fingers downhill.

There’s no window. No way to tell what’s out there except by the echoes of footfalls. Or screams. That’s a sound I could never make since they took away my lungs. So I can’t breathe it all in. So I can’t repeat what I hear, what I see. So no song graces my throat.

My song makes people feel. It makes them know. Beautiful things, and things that they wished they could un-know.

If I can’t sing, what good am I?

I can still listen. Hear the words that are spoken—and the ones that are not, the treacherous ones hidden beneath the surface.

Thank God I’m not the only one out there with these gifts. Thank God I’m not that special, so when I die here, it won’t be like an extinction.

They were black when they pulled them out of me, my lungs—they showed me. I don’t know what happened to them, after. Incinerated? Tossed outside among the rest of the trash? Fed to the dogs?

Or locked away someplace? Could I have them back again? The warden wants me to believe I can.

It’s his steps that echo now, so it’s me they’ll take and not the Brit in the cell next door (who doesn’t talk anymore either, but not for the same reason). He only ever comes personally to this wing for me.

I don’t know why he keeps on. I know I don’t amuse him. I don’t disgust him either. I’m just here, in my thin blue cotton draw-string pants and thin blue cotton long-sleeve tee-shirt and white paper slippers.

He’s coming.

I struggle to my feet. If I don’t, by the time they’re through with me I won’t be able to stand for a week. Old lessons die hard.

A key turns in the lock. The door swings on shrieking hinges. And there he is backlit to where the light forces me to squint, three guards armed with AKs behind him.

He’s six foot five, three hundred pounds, and what fat there is quivers over solid muscle. His hair is black (like all the rest of them), his moustache bushy and long and threaded with gray. His eyes like shiny black beetle carapaces. When he speaks, his voice carries the slow thickness of the bedrock under the prison, and tobacco tinges his breath. All wrapped in a khaki camouflage package with a Glock stuffed into his waistband.

He blames his subordinates for his own mistakes. The guards are in various stages of favor and none of them have been with him as long as I have. These new guys, two of them are a little smaller than the warden and one is almost slight—wiry, with light brown hair and green eyes. His skin is sun-darkened (blackened). I can’t tell where he’s from. But he doesn’t belong out here.

“I’m going to tell you a story today,” the warden says. He does every time. He tells me horrible things.

I’ll hear his words, and see the images and taste the smells and feel it all on my skin. But I won’t be able to sing it. Not ever. Maybe one day I’ll be so full of his stories, I’ll explode.

The wiry one motions with the barrel of his gun. Out. Into the deep, moldy chill of the hallway. My shuffle adds to the clock of boot heels. The sound is different on this side of the door—distinct. More real. I can’t mark the other cells. There are no cracks in the walls that suggest doors; the stone is smoothed over like mortar with a trowel. But there’s the rivulet I remember.

We walk about fifty yards. The door to the warden’s place is open. It’s blessedly warmer in here by ten or fifteen degrees. Space heater.

There are his books, strewn on the rumpled used-to-be-white sheets (dusted with black hairs) of his bed—the old kind without jackets, with red and green and brown gold-embossed cardboard covers, like my grandpa used to have. More of them stacked precariously on the gray metal folding side table.

They smell like library, perfume the room over and above the patina of smoke. Almost makes up for the concrete floor (although the warden has a rug, maroon and gold and green with ivory fringe) and the omnipresent dirt. He has a metal desk set bolted to the wall. An open laptop hibernates there. And, of course, more of the strung halogens.

He nods to the two big guards. “Dismissed.” They go, and close the door behind them.

To the wiry one, he angles his head towards the bed. “Have a seat.”

He does. The cot springs groan. He points the barrel of his gun toward the floor, but he doesn’t set it down and the muscle in his arms tenses just a little bit more so I can see it move under the skin, so I know he’s vigilant, he’s watching, don’t even think about it asshole.

I settle cross-legged on the rug. The warden does the same, across from me, finishes with a grunt. Better to tell a story to someone looking them in the eye. Better to see and be seen.

“What should we share today?” he asks, like it’s not a rhetorical question. “Captain Ahab? Giant? A Space Odyssey?”

Like I don’t know better. He frowns, considering. The bastard.

“No—I think we should talk about what happened to young Corporal Sandy last night.”

I try to make my eyes speak for me: You brought me here to hear it. But not: So get it over with.

Old lessons.

“Corporal Sandy came to us down dusty desert roads,” the warden said.

I could see it—taste it touch it smell it—as he spoke (clouds of fine sand billowed beneath the chassis and behind the back wheels, and the stars shone down cold from their vantage in the black velvet sky without a cloud to block the view). I had no choice but to feel every word in my marrow.

“Sealed in the back of a transport truck.”

(all alone, and the corrugated metal floor hurt to sit on, and the ruts in the road drove bruises into his thighs and his butt, and he had nothing to hold onto for sharp turns, and the floor near the front heated up so it almost burned because of the transmission underneath)

“The truck was not stopped by bandits, or blown up by a mine, or abandoned because the driver turned spineless dog, so Corporal Sandy did not asphyxiate. He arrived here at 02:00 hours. You know, he wasn’t really a corporal?”

(he’d been given the military designation on purpose, to confuse him, so he would lose hope right away because if he were a corporal then there’d be no pretense, even, of his having rights—and his name isn’t Sandy, either)

“We brought him in and threw him in a cell just like yours,” the warden says. He fishes a soft pack of smokes from his shirt pocket and shakes one out. He strikes a match on the floor behind him, the red tip exploding into orange and yellow flame and haloed in blue, punctuated with the quick reek of sulfur. He lights his cigarette with relish and blows a cloud of blue-gray in my face, lifts the hair off my brow.

(they threw him into a cell just like mine, only his had manacles on the wall and they hooked him in just high enough on the wall so he had to stand on the balls of his feet and just tight enough that the metal cut into his circulation)

“We left him there until just before dawn.”

(three hours like that, every passing second a lifetime of fear and wondering why)

“And then I went to see him and when I walked in I had our friend here take him down.” He jabbed a thumb toward Wiry, who still sat on the bed. With his finger on the trigger. And breath so shallow and fast he looked on the verge of hyperventilating and the pupils of his eyes had contracted to pinpoints in a sea of brown-flecked green and all the hairs on his arms stand attention, good soldiers.

(Corporal Sandy fell to his knees on the concrete and the shock of it stole his air and a moan escaped his traitor mouth)

The warden drew on his smoke. “He didn’t beg for his life. He didn’t ask why he was there. Because there was no logical reason. You know?”

(there never was, not anymore)

I make my eyes say: Don’t give me that bullshit, “you were just following orders.” He enjoyed it. Every minute of it.

He holds my gaze for a beat, then looks past me, into a corner.

(they didn’t ask Sandy any questions, only cast accusations)

“We worked on him for a bit,” the warden says. “Until he passed out.”

(punches to the kidneys)

The way they had punched mine.

“We soaked him in water to revive him.”

The way they had poured a bucket of filthy (I don’t want to know) over my head and thrown one in my face and I breathed it in and sputtered and choked on it and with the choking had come consciousness.

(boots in the gut, in the back of the head, vomit on the floor laying in his own bile)

The taste in my throat, gritty and I kept swallowing thinking that would make it go away.

“We broke his fingers for him.”

The way they had broken mine.

(and when you say we, you mean the man with the gun over there, because you couldn’t do it)

If I still had lungs, I’d have sucked in a breath.

I’ve never seen that before in anything he’s ever told me. That he couldn’t bring himself to do something. This one time. One time only.

Why?

(my own flesh and blood)

What?

His words fall like bricks gouged from a wall where something (someone) has been buried. They reek of wet rot.

Corporal Sandy had been his son.

“Do you know that this is the most important story I will ever tell you?” the warden asks.

I want to go.

He shakes his head.

I don’t want to know this. If I know this, then maybe whatever happened to Sandy will finally happen to me.

“Corporal Sandy passed out from the pain.”

Of having his fingers broken. I had, too.

(his mind left his body first, flown high on a kite string that circled over itself and knotted and pulled tight but wouldn’t tear, and his legs turned to rubber and he slid down the wall into a pile of flesh and bone on the floor and they doused him again)

“There was nothing he could do, nothing to say.”

(no mercy to be had and no reason)

“Do you understand?” the warden asks. He lights another cigarette off the cherry of the first before he stubs it out with sure, strong movements.

(nothing he could’ve done, all was written, all was preordained, he had no choice)

Around again to “just following orders.” It has to show in my face.

“You.” The warden nods at the wiry guy. “Take him back.”

He hasn’t finished the story. There are loose ends all over the place—too far to connect, like splattered paint.

Underneath it all, that’s where the ache is. He needs to tell me the rest of the tale. When has he ever needed anything?

And now I really, really don’t want to know.

The wiry guy takes me through the corridor, past the dripping rivulet. Into my cell. Shuts the door. The moonlight no longer undulates in the air. Wan sunlight tip-toes in here. Walking on eggshells. Like me.

There’s nothing else to do but sleep and think. I don’t want to think. If I don’t think, maybe I can get through this. But, oh, I have a bad, bad feeling.

Corporal Sandy is fifteen years old in my dream. He wears denim shorts two sizes too big that hang to the middle of his calves, a white muslin shirt, black and white flip-flops. He has the same hair as his father, the same beetle eyes. I’m supposed to feel sorry for him?

He runs outside along the fence line with its flaking brown paint, one foot in the dirt road and one in the too-high grass, all gangly arms and legs, kicking up dust into the cornflower sky, breathing in dung-saturated, afternoon heat. Thunderheads cluster on the horizon.

Where’s he running to?

I can’t see that far ahead and I don’t want to take the chance I might, so I lie awake and stare at the ceiling with my arms crossed under my head while the sun goes down again. Wiry comes in and shakes my shoulder.

He’s all alone. A sour wave rises on my tongue. That has never happened before.

My eyes ask where’s the warden and he knows what I’m doing just fine, but he doesn’t answer. He motions with the AK. Back to the warden’s office.

The warden might as well have not left the spot since yesterday; he sits in the same place, with the same uncomfortableness, with what might as well be the same smoke from the way it’s burned down. I hunker down across from him and the guard takes up his place again on the bed.

“We continue the story of Corporal Sandy,” he says. He’s carrying a good-size set of luggage under his eyes and his hair looks oily. Somebody swept up the butts from yesterday, but there’s a dozen more tiny black circles on the floor than when I left here last. How long had he sat there, smoking and remembering?

My belly seizes. My bowels feel loose.

“After we doused him, he came awake,” the warden says.

(when he was fifteen, running along that fence, one foot in the road and one in the grass)

“He panicked. Begged. It took us a while to calm him down.”

(you can die slow or you can die quick, shhhh)

“And he wanted to know why.” The warden shifts his weight, lifts one hand like he’s holding up a pie plate instead of an explanation. “He wanted to know why.”

(running along the fence, toward the orange flashes)

“And I said, I don’t know.”

(which wasn’t exactly true)

“They wanted it brutal. They wanted to see my loyalty. If he was going to die, I wanted to see it happen. To witness.” The warden lights another cigarette, blowing streamers of gray out his nostrils. Putting out the first among the other black circles. “I owed him that much.”

I don’t understand.

“So I sent the guards away. And I sat down to talk with him, face-to-face.”

(before I killed the last thing in this world I loved)

“He had hidden from me, you see,” the warden said. Of course I saw. I had no choice.

Fifteen years old running along the fence toward the orange flashes that leapt from his house, where his mother and sister had been inside in the heat of the day. Lungs heaving, choked on black smoke—and the smell. He couldn’t get in, because of the flames. He could only watch through the window.

“I wanted him to know how hard I looked for him these last five years, how many threats and how many rewards it took for him to be turned over to me.”

If he said it, even in innuendo, even if the words never passed his lips, I’d kill him right then. I didn’t care how. I’d find a way. If he said so he would know how much I loved him.

He looks at me and for a razor’s breath I see that’s not it at all. He doesn’t (didn’t) love his son; he didn’t even recognize him. He loves the fifteen-year-old boy, but that love is as tangled and rampant as kudzu.

There is no fucking reason. Or there is. But he doesn’t know it.

I expect to die any time now, just on general principles.

The warden takes a long, deep drag. “I shot him in the head.”

(it took an eternity of seconds to register the gun, the aim, the thinning of his father’s lips and by the time the realization bloomed in his mind it became a mushroom cloud and a quick pull, he hardly had a chance to hear the sound of the shot fired and hardly felt the bright black pai—)

“My men disposed of him, after.”

(they’ll never tell anyone, not where they are now)

“And then it was over. The End.”

Except it isn’t. I can smell the fucking gunpowder as if were my own memory made flesh in his words. I swallow my gorge.

“Take him,” the warden says to the wiry one.

I’m afraid to close my eyes—scared I’ll trip over my own feet or a bend in the concrete or that the guard will shoot me just as dead as Corporal Sandy.

Every rasp of my shoes grates my nerves. My teeth clench and the cold seeps in through my clothes, in through the pores of my skin until they start to chatter. I draw in my arms. Fold them across my chest. Inhale the damp.

The hollow sound his heels make grows louder every step. Closer.

The barrel of his gun grazes my lower back. He pushes it. Pushes me.

We’ve only come maybe twenty yards. I’m walking baby steps.

The next time he feels he has to remind me to move, he’ll leave bruises. I force my feet to gather a little more speed.

He shoves me into my cell for his trouble. I skid across the floor and stumble into the wall. Into the afternoon light streaming through the window. I jam my right thumb. Clock my head good. Take a shuddering breath. Wait for the shot. For the bullet to tear into me before I hear the report. Like Sandy.

The door slams. Boom! The walls reverb with the shockwave. The guard’s footfalls recede down the hall, back to where we came from.

I wish I could will myself to die, that it’d take. Better to pass by my own hand than by the warden’s and I know that’s going to happen as sure as the night has passed and the sun is rising. It is, after all, what happened to the guards who helped torture Corporal Sandy, who disposed of him.

Wiry comes for me a little while later, I’m not sure how long. I can no longer tell from the light. Or maybe I no longer care.

The warden sits on his goddamned rug with his goddamned cigarette trailing its gray stream into a fog that hugs the ceiling. I lower myself across from him because I have to. The guard closes the door. I don’t bother to get comfortable.

“So, I have told you the story of Corporal Sandy,” the warden says. Echoes of the smells and tastes and sounds vibrate in his words. “I’m sure you want to know why.”

Because I’m the one who can hear it all—who can sense it all right along with him. Someone who has no choice but to know exactly what happened, the things he did, what he went through, how he felt about it—and can never tell a soul.

“Because I need this”—he wrings his hands in the air like he’s squeezing out poison—“all of this, to go away.”

It will be very easy to make me go away. Oh, so easy.

“I can’t sleep,” he says, “for seeing Corporal Sandy’s face.”

If it’s that bad now, after just a couple of days, wait until it’s had time to really work on him. I hope it eats him from the inside. Devours him in every painful way possible. All the ones I can think of, and all the ones I can’t even begin to fathom.

He clears his throat. “So I give it all to you.”

I check for Wiry out of the corner of my eye. For the gun.

I put it all in my eyes: Ending me won’t fix this.

“I know,” he says. He nods to Wiry.

Here it comes. I hope I leave an indelible stain on the rug.

The guard rises from the warden’s cot with a muted protest from the springs. He steps behind me. In that moment I can’t see him—I can only feel the air his body displaces, a breeze on my skin.

He opens the door.

He and the warden take me the opposite direction from the trail back to my cell. A hundred yards. Past walls I’ve never seen before, rooms I know are there but can’t see, people I know are there, heartbeats muffled by stone. I try to dig my heels in, to put on the brakes, but they grab my elbows and drag me.

To another door. Plank wood with rivets, with a rusted, circular hanger for a knob.

The warden bends close. Speaks low in my ear. “I give it all to you, singer,” he says, mean emphasis on that last word, that gift he stole from me.

The guard wraps his fingers around the hanger and drags it toward us, bright sunlight filling the cracks between the door and the frame, puffs of earth dislodged, cascading in a fine rain. My eyes tear. Cold rushes in, frosts my breath.

The warden physically moves me. Outside.

“I cast you out,” he says.

I stare at him. He shuts the door in my face.

His words begin to sink in. The trembling starts in my chest, stutters through my arms and legs. I’m standing on the side of a mountain.

The sky is a blue-green sea without even a wisp of cloud, impossibly huge. There’s dirt underfoot, and squat shrubs and stubbly grass marking a well-worn track down.

The warden has taken my lungs and given me this. He thinks he’s won. He may try to forget—may even think he’s done it. But I will always remember the story of Corporal Sandy.

I’m not the only one in this wide world who can sing.

Snow-capped roofs huddle at the foot of the slope. Someone moves—several doll-sized someones. A village. None of them seem to notice me at all. But they know I’m here. They know.

I may carry ghosts, but I’m not one.

Leslie Claire Walker grew up among the darkly magical, lush bayous in the urban jungle of the Texas Gulf Coast — otherwise known as Houston — where she lives with assorted animal and plant companions, and two harps. Her short fiction has appeared in many amazing anthologies and magazines, including Fantasy Magazine, Electric Velocipede, and Chiaroscuro (Issue No. 32). Find her online at leslieclairewalker.com.