The Cell

Steven Rekstad

ENGL 050

                Thrust facedown into the cell, teeth grinding the grit of the dirt floor, I lay nursing a festering bitterness.  I could almost see the noxious fumes drift past my face, a testament to the centuries of mental and physical torture that have been endured within these walls.  Overwhelmed, I stumbled to my feet and wedged my face in between the coarse rusty bars. 

“I’m innocent! I would never kill my own wife, I was framed!”

Lumbering up, beady eyes barely visible under his dark brow, the guard looked curious.  Suspicious, I backed into my cave.

“Why don’t you come over here and we’ll have a chat?”

Cautiously I crept up.  “Closer now, don’t be shy.”  On high alert, I saw his hand constrict around his baton before violently swinging in a low arc, narrowly missing my face.  He swaggered off, his booming laugh echoing along the torch-lined catacomb. 

I reasoned with myself, “I was just trying to make a case for myself.” 

Weeks passed with no hope for freedom.  I ate my weevil lined bread and chicken broth when my stomach wasn’t in knots from the hopelessness and decimation I felt.  Days and nights blurred into one, with only the scarce meal to divide the time into segments.  Change came suddenly and unexpectedly when I awoke to the figure of another standing over me.  Clutching my wooden spoon as a shiv I backed into the corner in a defensive position.

Squinting through the darkness I made out the distinct lines of my childhood rival.  Ten years of school yard torment tarnished my younger years, yet he envy and hatred I felt for him seemed so trivial now that my life had fallen to shambles.  Still, fate had played a cruel trick on me.  Weeks of unanswered prayers for companionship and this is who answers?

He spoke, “I heard you were taken to justice just last Friday.  I didn’t believe it.  It was too good to be true, I needed to see it for myself.  Lo and behold, you stand before me emaciated and haggard, a murderer”.  Meaningless hatred rose again in my chest, renewed with purpose.  I lunged for his throat, giving him his just desserts after a lifetime of unanswered cruelty.  The guard burst through the cell door to separate us, “Visiting hour’s over!”  Barely audibly, I heard him whisper, “It was me” just as the guard turned a deaf ear.  I lashed out once more, answered by a heavy club to the head.

I awoke shackled to the wall, defeated.  My feet dangled limply.  Accepting my fate, I found a stone on which I could gain some upward force, I saw my chains slacken for a second.  On my second attempt I forced my wrist around my neck.  It tightened and I could feel the air in my lungs struggle to escape, starving my body of life. 

The Secret

You receive a phone call from your two best friends. 'Hey, we’ve done something terribly wrong and need your help. We can’t talk about it over the phone. Please meet us at the spot where we made our pact back in high school. You know the place.' Nervously, you grab your coat and car keys.

           

Squelching the doldrums of Spring Break was no easy task.  Left incapacitated by a viral infection from earlier in the month, my options of afternoon entertainment were restricted to watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show with the decontaminated remote control in a Zip-Lock baggie or seeing how far I could run around my neighborhood before my sickly stomach upchucked whatever it contained.  I chose the former, letting the slick plastic container slide and crinkle to the floor, my arms hanging limp.  I managed to convince my guilty conscience that I would only get sicker from being exposed to the elements.  My vision blurred and my thoughts drifted to the solar warmth that radiated off my German Shepard when he came through his doggie-door after a long siesta in the summer sun. 

Summer.  Only seven months ago I was sitting on the porch of my Senior Week house in Ocean City, Maryland waiting for the rusted-out grill to singe all the bacteria off the hamburgers that were soon to accompany my breakfast of three beers in a 7-Eleven Big Gulp.  It was the best four days of my life and the perfect Segway between the giant circle-jerk that was the second semester of high school and the wet t-shirt contest that was Penn State summer session. 

On day four I began to see our group falling apart, half our house’s male population falling prey to the overwhelming amount of liquor and lack of adult supervision.  A majority of our school was down the shore within a mile radius warranting flocks of our compadres gathering each night.  Our friend’s birthday came and my best friend Troy was beyond blackout drunk but still forging his way through the haze.  Too intoxicated to find his own way to the party he enlisted the help of our friend Pete, who I’d warned earlier in the day that Troy’s drinking had become a problem.  After pleas from the house’s girls and my shouting after them, they disappeared from view around the corner.  That was the last time I saw Troy in perfect health, if you could call it that.  Tending to our other friend Rob, who was babbling drunkenly on his bottom bunk we got a garbled call from one of the party house’s occupants, “…ambulance pulled up…shit-housed…Pete ran off…”  I punched a hole in the drywall next to the bed, “How the FUCK could this happen?  I’m going to find Pete and kick the shit out of him!”  I ran out the back door to find the rat sitting in the driver’s seat of our van.  Seeing my eyes bulging out of my head, he quickly fumbled with the car’s automatic lock.  I hit the side of the mom-mobile at top speed, denting the side.  Flecks of spittle coated the window, “You motherfucker, you left him! You’re dead!”

I snapped out of my daze in a giggle to my dog’s wet nose vacuuming the inside of my ear, one of my favorite childhood sensations.  I looked at my phone to find 2 NEW VOICEMAILS flashing across the screen, hitting redial.  Troy’s voice crackled over the speaker, “Hey, we’ve done something terribly wrong and need your help. We can’t talk about it over the phone. Please meet us at the spot where we made our pact back in high school. You know the place.”  

My nerves on edge, I grab my keys and coat and hop in my soccer-mom van, still dented on the side.  I pull up to the disc golf course separating our suburb from the downtown area and wait for a sign of motion.  There’s crunching behind me and I spin to find Troy and Rob.  “We came by to check on the body…the hole’s been dug up…we have to leave town.”

Shot

My assailen's pit of fury travels from his heart to mine
In a flash of magma and a hurricane of chemical smoke.

Hit with a boiling sledgehammer,
My chest explodes in a raging pain.

Molten lead burns inside me,
Scorching my vital components as it goes.

The bullet erupts from inside my goosedown jacket,
A carnival of feathers and visceral fluids.

Like confetti, they sprinkle to the ground;
A celebration to my life which has come to a close.

Mononucleosis Sucks

Mononucleosis Sucks

To lie in void, which was left long ago

My objects  packed, now reside far away

New friends, about everyday lives they go

I am helpless at home, days dull and grey

Trapped in my body, I flounder and flop

Missing my break, stuck in lonely bed rest

When will the onslaught of infection stop?

On my return I pray I feel my best

Burd-ning my mom, a deadweight in current

Guilt fills my heart and poisons fill my mind

Appreciation for her I have learnt

Reparation for her aid I will find

Sterile office and cold metal tool

I would give my left nut to be in school

                I felt a sonnet would best describe the woes that I am going though.  I thought the feeling of being back home treated like a child after finally escaping the clutches of my small town would be best expressed in the dialogue-mimicking style.  The heartbeat duplicating pattern seemed to fit the theme of sickness, with the possibly accidental errors in accents symbolizing my ailments.  I liked the couplet at the end, I thought the hint of humor would give it a distinct identity.  I like how sometimes you have to change the pronunciation of words to fit the metre and rhythm, like when I used burd-ning instead of burdening to get one less syllable.  I remember in Romeo and Juliet when Shakespeare uses banishèd instead of banished to add an extra syllable when Romeo is outcast from Verona.  I can’t imagine writing an entire play using iambic pentameter, it was a huge pain and I’m still not sure I used it correctly.  Mad respect, Shakespeare.

                I did not like the style of Villanelle, the tercets with the first and last lines rhyming for multiple stanzas felt awkward like it rhymed like ABAABAA, I didn’t like how it sounded unless you pause in between stanzas.

                The Ghazal ends multiple lines with the same word and one of my pet peeves is repetition of words in writing so that was an obvious style to drop from the running.

                Similarly with the Pantoum you are supposed to repeat lines, which I feel is just unacceptable and would bother me to no end unless I really found a topic I could fit into it, like running on a treadmill where my mind keeps returning to the same thought because I’m so bored.