An Alliteration
Night descended as it always did on Dexter, retiring people to their beds after the labour of the day and down in Boorbunk what signified the coming of the night was the utter darkness that they were hit with as the inmates lay now on their creaky metal beds that was not entirely their size. Snores could be heard everywhere but even if everyone was going to sleep not Pierson, not Tristan, not Dale.
Pierson was sitting on his bed with a locket in his hand, attached to a chain. He had that locket in his possession since…a long time ago. He didn’t know how long he had worn that necklace as a bracelet on his wrist. It was since his life had started, since light had come to it, about fifteen years ago. He opened the locket and brought out the pictures it contained. Through the dark, he managed to see the faces of the people on it. There was Michael’s face on the first picture, Barry was next and then the rest of them had followed, in the order in which they had met.
All through his life, he never had parents, he never had a blood family and then after all the struggles he had faced ever since he was young, life dealt him one momentous whim, he met with Michael and Barry. Since he moved with them, he didn’t have the cause to look back one time and feel like an orphan, he met a family, a brotherhood and the rest who had joined them felt the same. Since then, he had designed this locket and filled it with the tiny pictures of all these men that changed his life. Now, fate dealt them a blow and brought them in this ghastly place for what they know zilch about. It was like being brought into this empty, cold pipe with no light penetrating it and get stuck in it. In the real sense, there was no way of making it out and anyone who prayed and wished for The Redemption to be his turn was probably going to wait till the kingdom came. The Death Toast was a hundred times more likely to befall someone than The Redemption.
Pierson sighed as he remembered that he sworn to himself to never feel depressed again no matter what happened to him, he had learnt to block the worst of circumstances out of his mind and he had pledged to keep to the rule. He closed the locket and left it dangling from his left wrist.
Tristan was just in the next room and yet again, he was facing the main difficulty that hindered his sleep each night in the cell. The bed was too short for his legs and so he had to cope with his knees laying it numb with the sole of the feet scraping the ground below. He stood up and paced around, thinking about the last meeting he had with Samantha and what was coming to his mind was the utterly disturbing way she looked at him after he said that. He felt a little guilty to telling those words like that. After his mother, Samantha had been the only person who had told him she loved him.
That night, he had said no to his craving for alcoholism, never to return to it anymore. With each day he spent with her, he strived to prove to himself that he could be a little more than the man he regretted to call his father and used everything to make her smile each day. He made sure she didn’t suffer in anyways the way his mother had done and when the worst had come to worst and he had yelled at her, he felt like a killer, like his father. And then now, she had to give birth to a child for him. A son. He felt more responsibility to show to him that life could be the best place to be, to make him live in Reckdette with a father and mother who live in harmony together. His dreams and vision had been going in line; he would have gotten a job in Reckdette with the rest of his band, he would have had enough cash to spoil his family with, he had written a thousand jokes that he was going to make his son crack his ribs with. With all the hatred with which he had hated his father and all the love with which he had loved his mother, he converted everything to love for his new family.
Now, the love with which he had planned the best for them was the same love he had in his mind that made him want to push them away. He didn’t want Samantha to come all the way to Boorbunk to see him anymore, he felt afraid that one day she was going to come with his son and the officer would tell her that he was dead. He didn’t want to hurt herself, he just wanted her to go because that was the best resolution. He wanted her to go because The Boorbunk wasn’t a life sentence, The place swallowed people.
Dale was at his sink. He hadn’t been able to sleep since the day that Michael had died and the half-moons shown beneath his eyelids were a confirmation. Ever since that day, his system had gone downhill, the gory sight of Carreras had also followed. And now being alone in darkness wasn’t helping matters. He kept washing his face until he thought it had helped a little and then he staggered back to his shelf. He had kept his bed folded back into the wall as it had little functionality. He looked down at his wet hands and brought them to his face. He remembered Michael’s words: ‘Keep calm, everything that happens here is fate’ and he thought he heard those words spoken by the other person who had previously said those words to him. It was at that time that he discovered that the person who had told him those words before was his father but he hadn’t actually said those things. In fact, he had said completely dissimilar things.
His mind slipped back in time again and he could hear his father’s voice shouting, he had called Dale’s name and then said: ‘I want you to learn to fight. Fight for yourself and don’t care what happens. Don’t care about keeping things simple and saving yourself because if you try, you will never achieve solace. Learn to fight even when the rest of the world’s forces are against you’, he had said and whether he had been right or not, Dale felt himself conform to the new rule with unflinching inclination, even though he didn’t know how it applied in this repugnant place. All he knew was that keeping calm wasn’t the answer and surrendering to fate also wasn’t. Fighting was. He stood up from his seat and went to wash his face one more time.
The next day, Barry became the first man that they witnessed to be taken to The Hole. Ever since Michael died, Barry became outwardly bitter to the officers speaking to them in a snippy way and that had put him on the radar of getting in the Hole. He remained in there for the rest of the day and judging from what Peter had said, he was going to be there for the average of a week until someone from one of the wards replaced him.
Boorbunk remained Boorbunk, the indignation remained, the acridity continued hanging over the four walls like bright green smoke. The one-thousand internees of the inescapable hellhole remained moving about in their orange uniforms, with their daily sojourns and their boring burdensome jobs, though not as tough as the death knell they faced and the sinister miasma that bellowed all around it. Other times, they were left to endure reflections, silent thinking and discerning the circumstances surrounding their arrival in there. It had all happened the same way. The police had arrived and they would have thought it was a really bad joke, a prank until they find that it’s not and then later on, they would also learn that the life sentence they were sentenced to wasn’t the worst yet to be witnessed. And for Dale, Tristan, Barry and Pierson, it was all about holding themselves tighter and hoping for the best. But that was the mistake, no one hoped for the best in a place like Boorbunk. Like Dexter.

The governor had a different colour for the frame of a glasses that made him look more upright, or in this case, more grisly. On the wall just above his head lay the small skull of Carreras and the holes in his head could still be seen through the ink that it had been painted. He could have been me and I could be next, Dale thought and his body tremored. The place was silent as usual and Dale rolled his tongue against the taste of the wine they had just previously drunk. The expression on the bony remains of his head said it all, his mouth was open just the way he had died crying for help.
‘The welfare of the people of Gollogher is of utmost importance to us and the tears of the people is one thing that I will work to end, with all the power I have while I am still in office’, the very words of Governor Dormas came to Dale. He watched the man now, walk with majestic poise, that kind of walk-up that you do when you have been called to do something that you have always wanted to do, something that you are happy about, something that you are proud of. He moved his fingers over all the planks on the table for quite some while.
‘And then this is the lucky one’, he said after he grabbed one. There was a hysterical laugh by the rest of the officers and the master officer who did the favour of reading out the names.
‘Another four weeks have passed. And you know how it is done, once your name is called, you get to take a look at the faces of everyone here and the rest of the earthly things all around here because trust me, you would not find all these items in hell’, he said and grinned in satisfaction, with the rest of the officers bursting into spirited laughter. ‘Hmm, this person names rhymes beautifully’, he said and he looked back at the governor who had this strange simper on his face. He took one look at the prisoners with chains on their wrists, all staring unsteadily at him with sweat gathered on their foreheads and all over their faces, uncalm silence, distorted loud breaths, whispered prayers, some of them had their eyes shut. All the officers loved the moment, they loved the palpable fear and the longer the better. The taunts in-between was also important to increasing the pressure.
‘You know something like an alliteration. Like a name with a B as the first name and B as the last name’, he said and the rest of the officers laughed again, messing big time with the minds of the eighty-five prisoners who were surely going to be decreased by one, very soon. ‘Okay, okay’, he said and cleared his throat.
‘It’s a Plummer, it’s a Pierson’, he said and the rest of the actions followed. Everything was happening in slow motion in the face of Dale, the executioners marched up to Pierson and held him behind his arms down to the firing squad unit.
‘No’, Dale screamed as he ran up trying to pull Pierson back but some of the officers held him back and shoved him away to the ground. He closed his eyes and when he tried to open it, the water clouding it made his vision blurred but he could see a locket, it was Pierson’s and he had dropped it off his wrist to the ground, something that meant a farewell to the rest of the group.
He stood up and ran to pick it up. As he picked the locket from the ground and looked at all the pictures in it, the blasts from the near room showed that two of the pictures there were only going to serve as memories, henceforth. He screamed out and fell to the ground, even though Tristan had tried to help him up.
It made Dale remember one song that Barry and Michael had composed, it had been called Die with a friend and he cried more and more, going crazy, hurting himself and he could no longer be controlled.
Everyone was taken to their cells and as Barry could hear the endless shout of Dale in his cell, he remembered two Death Toasts ago, that had been him in overbearing torture of losing someone that had been connected with him, bonded to him with an element stronger than blood.
When we are done with our works, sitting at the porch on cane chairs watching the sun go down, we would smile and heave a final sigh, tell our friends that we did well on this Earth, tell our friends that life was worth living. We would hold each other and close our eyes together. We will die with our friends on a bright, sunny afternoon, Barry hummed and now the song made more sense than ever before. It made more sense because the reality of the song could only get to happen in his mind, there was no such thing as a bright, sunny afternoon anymore, it was all grey, heavy clouds. No porch to sit at, only little rooms with rusting doors that locked them in and life didn’t feel worth living.
Tristan had his face in his palm crying, not knowing how to stop, he wasn’t meant to. He was meant to pour it all out until the cause came for it again.
A warden came around with a club in his hand and he stopped at Dale’s cell and hit the bars with the rod numerous times. ‘Shut up!’ but the wails from Dale could still be heard above any other thing. He later left with Dale’s thundering still protesting the death of Pierson.