1.07 Amber

After frisking me one more time, Bubbles orders me back into the cell and slams the door shut behind me. The whole exercise takes less than five minutes, but leaves my head spinning a good thirty just as every stark reminder of where I am and the events that have led to my arrest does.

This can’t really be happening.

I lie down on the tatami, clutching my head and begging for deliverance. A guard, passing by in the corridor taps his nightstick against the bars, and barks, "No sleeping!"

"Who’s sleeping?"

"No sleeping," he says and walks off.

Grudgingly, I push myself off the floor and sit with my back against one wall, eyes focused on another.

The cell is nothing like the tidy, antiseptic cells you’ll find in photos released to the media by the Ministry of Justice to show how humanely prisoners are treated in Japan.

The walls are a dingy white. A gray three-foot high border running along the base is mottled with the greasy silhouettes of past inmates, who’ve idled away weeks and months, if not years, with their filthy, sweaty backs leaning against the walls.

Two seedy, tick-infested tatami mats, measuring four and a half feet by six total, form the main area of the cell. And, if it weren’t already cramped enough, in addition to the futon folded up in the corner near the toilet, there is a cheap, low-lying desk, if you can call it one, butted up against the wall near the door.

On the desk, a tin kettle and a plastic cup, each as stained as a smoker’s smile as the next, have been waiting for me since I was admitted last night. In the plastic yellow basket tucked under the desk, are the underwear and pajamas issued to me, as well as a few items of my own clothes I was allowed to take inside with me, sans belts, long strings, or shoelaces.

A poster-sized calendar featuring the months of July to December and a photo of a bee hovering above a flower, sucking nectar has been taped to the wall above the desk.

Reaching up, I touch “today”: Wednesday, the 12th of July, 2006. I can’t help but feel as frozen in time as the bee in this poster, like a bug trapped forevermore in amber.

Anxiety comes crashing back like a tsunami against my temples.

How the fuck could this possibly be happening? To me of all people? How?

Jail never figured into the calculus of my life. Never. And yet, here I am, hemmed in by stark geometry.

In the rear of the cell, separated by a low concrete wall is an anachronism of a toilet: a rectangular porcelain trough set in a block of concrete easily as old this fifty-some-year old jail. I’ve come across some pretty odd Japanese-style crappers, but this one takes the cake. Just beyond the toilet, and the concrete washbasin opposite it, is a large barred window, overlooking a courtyard overrun with waist-high weeds.

A small flock of sparrows, hidden among the grasses, chatter noisily, not a care in the whole wide world. Swallows dart in and out of the weeds, finding breakfast they return to a mud nest they’ve built in the breeze-block wall of Cell Block D.

I wish I were a bird. Then again, I'd probably just end up being locked up in a cage all the same.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The first installment of No.6 can be found here.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.