Free to Write

Sunlight gleamed as tiny as a baby's hand, breaking through the bars in the window high on the wall, into his cell. "As if giving news of the life outside," he thought. Come spring, he'd be liberated like the flowers, like Azaleas blooming in the front yard of his house where he used to live.

For a moment, he held on to the joy of it, the joy of being, that there was always life in life, that he could still breathe for another three months.

Maybe she would come to see him then. She would stare at him in a trance, her eyes clouded with disgust and her teeth stained with betrayal, while the photographers' cameras would flash, and he would trudge along the corridor, walking his last walk.