CHAPTER 1
Hell isn’t a place you go, it’s a place you carry back.
That’s my poetic opinion after serving three years in prison for something I didn’t do.
Willingly, I might add. Not the shit I didn’t do, but the shit I went in for.
But if you want my professional opinion on hell—and at this point in my life, I feel like I’m qualified to have a professional opinion—Hell is just… well, everything around you.
This world. These people. All the rules, all the traps, the entire fuckin’ game is rigged.
That’s hell.
It’s everywhere.
But… occasionally.
Every once in a while.
There is a day like today that makes Hell not so hot.
The gates of Whitefall Prison open in front of me. Loud, and clanging as radio chatter from the guards fills the gap between this world and that one. The June morning spreads out beforeme in a way I’ve never noticed before. Bright, hot, and… oddly, empty.
One of the guards starts yappin’ at me to fucking get on with it and starts the mechanism to close the gates back up as he makes pointless, hollow threats. So when I do get on with it, I pass through just before the heavy steel gates slam closed.
It’s a lot of pointless drama.
Another guard heckles me from the tower when I pause, fumbling through the yellow envelope that contains pretty much everything I own at the moment—a twenty-seven-dollar cash-out from my prison account and my driver’s license, two years expired—and remove a pack of Reds.
Demon this, the hecklin’ guard says.Demon that.Demon…Demon…Demon.
Cause that’s me.
Legion Kane.
We are many.
I take out a smoke, light it up using the Bic that also did time with me, suck in my freedom, and slowly distance myself from the three years of time I did, but didn’t have to.
Trying to remember to appreciate it.
Inhale. A ritual to keep me standing.
Exhale. The smoke drifts up like a prayer.
I take a few steps away from the prison, no urge to look back, and just scan the world before me as I continue smoking.
It’s a whole bunch of nothin’. I’m talking big sky over vast badlands and that’s about it.
But it shouldn’t be this way.
This parking lot should not be empty.
But I guess it checks out, because I’m early.
One dayearly.
What could that possibly mean? What government facility actually makes mistakes in your favor? It doesn’t happen.
