skonen_blades

I’m not a person
I’m sentient plumbing
Halloweening as a man
Gelatinous ghost prison
Tall water balloon
of my ancestors’ DNA
A silly goose
With delusions of gander




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Peace begins with a scar.
Happiness leaves on the wings of a bird,
Sadness leaves on the back of a turtle.
You can’t lasso something that isn’t there.
Heartbreak loves company.
Time is a relentless wheel,
Breaking in the already broken.
You can only escape to the prison next door
Or the big one outside
Because you are never out there somewhere
You are always in here
Each couple a pair of odd socks
Each of us holding up self-portraits in progress
As disguises
That wouldn’t fool most moviegoers
This cliff dive
A push or a jump, it’s still going to happen
The irony is that
We are united in our loneliness
Common in our isolation
Everyone can identify with solitary confinement
Because we live there
We experience it together
And separately at the same time
Like how light is a photon
And a wave
At the same time
And that’s us
But peace begins with a scar
That you get from bumping into the walls
From trying to dig your way out
From smashing against the bars
Once you find a way to live here
Once you realize you will always live here
You can find a way to tolerate it
Hopefully a healthy way
And that’s life




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I’m a guard at a prison where my identical twin is being held.

It’s embarrassing.

Management wants to send me away because of the obvious conflict of interest but I don’t want to go. I grew up here. I don’t want to move to a different city or get a new job at my age.

Also, I’d never help my twin escape this place. I feel betrayed by him. Hard work got me to where I am today.

Shortcuts, stupidity, and getting caught got him where he is.

Yet he’s got my genes. It’s unsettling. What does that say about me?

He doesn’t say much to me. No insults or overt aggression. My twin just looks at me, not sadly but worryingly content. Like he rolled the dice and lost but at least he rolled the dice. His fellow prisoners are his tribe, his kind. I am the trespasser here, the visitor.

I like me. I like my life, my marriage, my children, my house. I like the path of moderation I’ve taken. I like my safe friendships, my frugal shopping habits, my polite laugh. I like them a lot. I take vacations every two years with Linda and we enjoy the time away but look forward to coming back.

Lately, I’ve been reminding myself how much I like my life. Every day. It worries me how much I tell this to myself.

And my twin says nothing. Just keeps looking at me with a knowing grin and a shake of his head like I’m the one that screwed up. Like a father’s knowing glance at a child’s obvious mistake. No admonition or rancor, just a look. A look of love but tinged with a bit of pity.

I am the man in uniform. I am the man with the gun. I am the man with the government on my side. I am the man with the life that spells out victory in terms of society.

But my twin’s look makes me feel like he’s free and somehow, even though I’m free to leave this place, I’m the one in prison.




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It was the physical changes that were the hardest to get used to.

I’m not just talking about the year of physiotherapy. I’m talking about the grey hairs. I’m talking about the soft skin. That and the gradual finding out that life has passed you by. People looked at you and nodded but that close trust was gone. The connection was severed. Parties, deaths, deals, power struggles, marriages, births. They’d all gone on while you slept. You showed up years later with canes and an older body.

There were no prison visits. There were no gyms. It was a snap of the fingers and they took years away. Parole for good behaviour didn’t exist. For guys that had been sentenced to really hard time, it was a slow execution.

You get caught, you go under. That had become the answer to the prison crisis. People were put on trial, sentenced, and given a shot. They were slotted into a sleep chamber in a penal hotel somewhere to carry out their sentence in a dreamless sleep. Sleeping uglies with no prince. The liberals loved the humane aspect of it all, the conservatives loved the cruelty of it all, and the general populace had a nice, happy image of cons sleeping like babies. Everyone wins.

When a criminal’s time was done, they were woken up. The light on the front of their chamber changed from red to green with a little ‘ding’ sound, just like a toaster oven telling the cook that the pizza inside was done.

Muscles do a little shrinkage if you don’t move them for a few years, even with the electrical stimulus in the coffins. It’s really painful to get those muscles working again. It takes a long time.

But like I said, that wasn’t the hard part. I’d been under for twenty years. I went in when I was twenty-six. I’m forty-six now. When I went in, I had the body of an athlete. My memories were full of sex, murder, fights, and running from the cops in a body that did it easily. Those memories end, in my mind, about six weeks ago.

I don’t recognize the cars or the fashions. I walk so slow.

I looked up my old gang friends. All dead except for three of them. Those three took pity on me and gave me some cash but I could tell from the look in their eyes that they’d never let me back into the syndicate.

I looked up my old girlfriends. Couldn’t find any of them. Names changed because they got married or they’d died as well. None of us led a good life out here. We all wanted to die young and most of us got our wish granted.

I feel like a ghost. Time to make some new friends. I didn’t have the faintest idea where to begin.

I could feel the need to commit a crime and go back to sleep twisting around inside my head like a hot wire.

I felt too weak to deal with this new life.



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Beaten to death with a floorboard. It’s a guy thing. I wouldn’t even say that it was spur-of-the-moment. I wouldn’t even recognize the term. The charges were spun out of wool, the jury was deaf and mean, and three consecutive life sentences later, they still don’t know why I’m not dead.

I made a deal that turns these cell bars into a xylophone for tin cups. The grandson of the judge that sentenced me sits on the bench now, following in his grandfather’s footsteps. Black hair, eager-eyed and ready to practice some law. He should have made shoes for horses. He has the arms of a blacksmith and no head for law.

He has this idea that right and wrong had a place in the courtroom. He was going to be ground down over a lifetime.

My room mate was a barrel of muscle, barely contained by the orange jumpsuit that we all wore. He was thick where I was thin. I knew that if he took a mind to make me more than just a friend, I wouldn’t be able to stop him. However, he never talked and he never laid a hand on me. It was five weeks into his sentence and I still didn’t even know his name. I liked it. It was like a game.

We learn to do without clocks in here.

The thing about deals with demons that need sacrifices is that they usually screw you over, genie-style. Here I am, immortal, and I’m in jail. To keep being immortal, I need to sacrifice a soul to the Dark Minion every six years. Coincidentally, I am also up for parole every six years. I know that this has been arranged by forces beyond my control and that there are smug smiles in Hell.

One day before my scheduled parole hearing. I need to say the prayers, recite the words, sharpen a toothbrush, walk into the courtyard, and kill someone. The actually killing doesn’t need to be complicated, it’s the words beforehand and the trance that are important.

If I don’t do it, I will age centuries over the course of a couple of days and turn into dust. To survive, I need to totally screw any chance of parole.

Hilarious, right? Yeah, I think so, too.

I’ve read everything in this library. I’m starting to think of this prison as my house. The guards keep coming and going as do the judges. By keeping my head down, no one has noticed me. I think that it might have something to do with the incantation as well. If anyone noticed that I wasn’t dead and it had been over a century, they’d probably do experiments on me and treat me like a savior. Hell will keep me from being noticed.

I listen to my cellmate snore.




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It was China that finally did it.

So little was known about explosive decompression of the human body in space. There had been assumptions and guesses but nothing had happened yet in terms of accidents to give the scientists any bodies to study.

China’s space program was also curious.

It also happened to have ten criminals that it had condemned to death and were in good enough physical condition to qualify as astronauts.

They were strapped into their roller coaster chairs and kept in the cargo bay of the shuttle. Funny how the government didn’t balk at the idea of how much ten bodies would cost them in terms of fuel but they felt it was okay to skimp on anesthetic.

China’s government wasn’t doing it completely independently. They had been caught early on in the planning. After some top-secret political wrangling, the other two major governments of Earth had given China the silent go-ahead with the proviso that they share their data. They’d condemn the action if it ever came to light but other than that, they wouldn’t interfere. The information would be valuable and no one except China had the balls to do something like this.

And since there were no civilians up in space at the moment, eyewitnesses would be scarce.

The chairs were fitted with restraints bolted to the floor of the cargo bay. At no point would the prisoners be released. They’d simple be exposed to the vacuum of space for ten minutes and then the cargo bay would close and the shuttle would head back down to Earth.

Simple. Easy. Effective.

Like all horrible plans.

First of all, two of the criminals were adept at escaping locks. Second of all, space agencies weren’t as good at designing criminal restraints as prisons were. Third of all, the plan was to do the mission in radio silence. And fourth, the shuttles these days were mostly automated except for landing.

Weng Pen got out first when the G’s stopped. Pei Sheng followed suit. They freed the others.

One of the crew needed to do a final check on the how many prisoners had survived lift off before the decompression. If only he’d checked the video feeds coming from the bay.

That open door was all the prisoners needed.

The prisoners surged forth, overwhelmimg the crew. They killed them or rendered them unconscious. The prisoners strapped the five crew members into the chairs.

The criminals gathered into the cockpit and watched the red numbers count down with smiles on their faces.

The doors opened. Ten minutes passed. The doors closed. The ship turned slowly on its pre-programmed course back to China.

The dead bodies of the crew were the first images that ground control saw when the ship was back within accepted broadcast range parameters.

The other thing they saw was the laughing faces of the prisoners in the cockpit as manual control was restored to them for the landing.

One hard right later, the entire shuttle port and ninety government officials were ionized gas in the crater of the shuttle’s impact.

That was six years ago.

The rest of the governments of Earth are still waiting for an accident to provide them with what happens upon an explosive decompression.




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There are those that believe that life is an island.

A land-locked existence in which birth is the only way to enter and death is the only way to leave. Perhaps a bad place, perhaps a paradise, but definitely a closed system while we’re here.

I disagree entirely. I think that life is a prison break from that place. Life is swimming away from that island to an unknowable shore. It’s an endurance test that lasts exactly one liftime.

And there are sharks.



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The tension during visiting time is intense. The eye-sex that happens in prison visiting rooms is like none other on Earth. The rooms are awash with pheromones. It’s a foggy stink that attacks the sex centers of the mind.

When a person inside prison receives visitors, they can’t touch. No physical contact is allowed.

This is tough on people that are in love and visiting each other.

In London, back before the turn of the century, each touch was worth a demerit. Guards made tick marks on pieces of paper to denote the number of touches. Twelve marks were worth an extra year inside the jail.

There were jokes based around inmate’s sentences. “If you keep visiting me, I’m never getting outta here.” was a famous line of the time.

Guards came up with a code. X’s for kisses, O’s for hugs. If a kiss or a hug went over ten seconds, another mark was added.

Mail between inmates and their partners on the outside became signed with X’s and O’s in a sarcastic thumbing of the nose to the guards. "This is how many kisses and hugs I'm giving you. This is how much time you're worth." those crosses and circles said.

It’s where we get those symbols.



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It started, as these things always do, with a kiss.

Advice is useless to the young. That is their curse and their strength. They have no idea that some of the things that they attempt are impossible. That’s why an alarmingly high percentage of them succeed.

Like Jonas Brigand, sitting in a cheap metal chair in a prison cube waiting room, starting at his watch, currently waiting for his girlfriend to get out of prison.

“Times are tough in the colonies” goes the song. Young men and women were subject to the same set of laws as the adults. With the ability to breed came responsibility. It was too harsh a world to even consider doing it otherwise.

Once society had been set up, once the terraforming tents were a memory and the world was green, the new generations would be fat and slow on the world that the hardpack settlers like Jonas Brigand and his girlfriend had made for them.

The scars on his hands stared mutely back at him. He was fourteen. His girl, Jayley Cordsmith, was sixteen. Her body was just as strong and scarred as his.

She was pulling six days for drunk and disorderly. Six days of pay gone. She have to work a month of doubles to get that back. She’d do it, too.

Jonas had the beginnings of a manbeard. His flat nose was the result of beatings from the ones that reared him and a life of never backing down.

Jayley had the short dreads of a hullpatcher and was missing a pinky on her left hand. Jonas thought of her working with her hammer belt in the hot sun. She’d be seventeen in Quadrember but he’d be sixteen two months earlier. For two months, they’d be the same age.

For two months, their drinking, mating, and eating privileges would be equal. They’d both have one ‘drop the charges’ card each to use as they saw fit. They could do anything that didn’t result in a loss of life or the damage of company property.

Jonas usually punched a supervisor. It was a popular choice.

Now Jonas wasn’t sure there would be any more cards or privileges for Jayley at all.

Jayley had decided that she was unhappy with the system and stopped going to work. They’d thrown her in the clink almost immediately.

Strike was a forbidden action. It couldn’t be tolerated. There were always one or two people that started the talk once the project neared completion but that was a decade off. Besides, Jayley loved to work.

The door at the end of the hall clicked and hissed. The hatchratchet spun and the door creaked open.

Jayley ran through. Jonas stood up and caught her in his arms.

She was missing a tooth and she had a black eye but her eyes shimmered with the usual angry light.

“We have to take them down, Jonas. We have to make this place ours.” She said.

They hadn’t even come close to breaking her.

Then she kissed him.









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We caught prisoners and took out one of their lungs. In the resulting space, we packed in a lot of explosives and a tracker.

Before that, we’d beat the prisoners senseless and abuse them so that they were in no shape to register or notice that they’d been operated on.

We weakened part of the fence outside and purposefully told seven of the brand new guards about the faulty security pads near the weakened fence. Then it was just a game of waiting.

They were always so daring. Information was bought off of the new guards and rescue operations were planned.

Late at night, they’d come out of the woods, dressed in black, and silently kill the power to the lights in that sector. They’d come through the weak part of the fence and punch the proper numbers into the faulty keypad.

They’d rescue the prisoners and run back through the fence.

We’d watch the tracker dots on our screens for days until they stopped in one place for more than two days.

Then we’d press the button.

The hidden lung would blow up and take out a whole nest of rebels.

So far, we’ve done it sixteen times. They just never learn.


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