Early December, 2010
Tw: dark themes, confinement
Winters in Maine were painful. The cold air bit at his skin, through the scratchy fabric of his pajamas. It was almost five in the early hours of the morning, he’d guess. The last bed check had been about an hour ago, and any minute now they’d be back again to wake them for the day.
There was an ever present throbbing in his head, it had been there for a little over a year now, spreading from the top of his spine to behind his eyes. It made sleep a luxury he couldn’t afford most nights, his eyes burning holes in the darkness as he listened to the dreams, or more commonly, to the nightmares of the boys around him.
Listening to a blanket of voices devoid of hope, drenched in fear, as he tried desperately to will himself to shut it out.
They’d broken him. He was sure of it. That this was his personal decent into madness, that eventually he’d no longer see a line where he ended and everything else began.
A small brown bird flies past the single window in the room he shares with six other boys his age. A few inches of the outside world made visible to him between thick rusted bars. It’s hard to make it out in the dim morning light, but he’s pretty sure it’s a sparrow.
When he’d been seven or eight, a guest reader at the old school had read them “Sparrow Girl”, he doesn’t remember much of the plot now, but the drawing on the cover as she read aloud to them is there, tucked away safely in his mind. A rare memory of his past, one of the few he can look back on now and not feel afraid of.
The bird lands on a branch outside the window, stays there for a few moments before flying out of view. He wonders to himself, where’d it go? What had it done with its freedom?
Maybe it flew home to a nest, tucked away in the dense needles of a pine tree. Hidden from the cold, huddled close to it’s family, protected from bigger birds with more power.
Maybe it was leaving Maine all together, in search of a better life somewhere else. Outside of windows without bars on them.
He hopes the sparrow knows how lucky it is to be given the ability to go.
Dylan lays his head back against the lumpy pillow, takes a few breaths. In and out. In and out. Stays like that until the door is pulled open, a light switch is turned up, and a man is shouting for them to get out of bed.
