Incarceration & Fire

Part of the SJ Sounds Series

Written by Muse Lee
Audio design by Sean Emmett Thompson

[AUDIO DESCRIPTION: As two compatriots seek to escape the fate of an emblazoned world, tension tightens around - them. Guitar scrapes and screeching rails underscore the internal emotions and external soundscapes of their travels, now both memories in Jin’s mind and reality. Jin maps out his world, and we hear glimpses of the landscape written in black ink, while fires make their siren’s call in the mountains.]

The Future

“Anselmo scrapes the burnt parts off of meat,” said Jin, leaning over his elbows emphatically. “With a fork! I saw yesterday at the special dinner the drum circle people brought.”

“I’d just be glad they were cooked good enough to burn,” Fen replied, dazzled.

Jin hit the tabletop, prompting an officer to look sharply over. “Exactly! But Anselmo—” The man himself appeared behind Fen, and Jin welcomed him with frantic waves of his arms, making Anselmo quirk an eyebrow and the next table over snicker. 

They were in the cafeteria again: another day, another talk about programs. Anselmo had barely gotten a chance to ease himself down onto the bench before Jin was pressing, “What is it you said, Preacher? About burnt meat?”

“You look tired, Jin,” replied Anselmo, settling next to Fen. “Helvig again?”

Jin sighed. “Unfortunately.” He rested his head in one hand, already a little deflated. “But tell Fen what you said about burnt meat.”

“It may be a carcinogen.”

“And what’s that?” asked Jin. He knew, or knew well enough, but he liked hearing the preacher explain things. It was calming, in a way. When Anselmo said something, you felt it, like it was some fact of the universe. It seemed that Fen thought the same, leaning forward to hear the answer.

“A substance that might cause cancer,” said Anselmo. “Of course, they don’t know that for sure, but I don’t like to take risks.”

Jin shook his head. “This man is never going to die,” he declared, earnest, and Fen vigorously nodded. Anselmo, though, was no longer looking at them. Jin recognized the look on his face even before turning to see what he saw.

“Hiding, Anselmo?” 

With a sinking feeling, Jin noted that the Pups had arrived at their table: the old guy with the teeth and muscle, the tall bald one with the crossed arms, the hard-knuckled boy who couldn’t be much older than Fen.

Anselmo didn’t deign to rise. “Good evening to you, too.” He tilted his head to look at them. “You got something you wanna say to me?”

“We noticed you weren’t sitting in your usual spot,” said the tall bald one, leading the pack. “What, you too much of a fucking coward for a friendly fucking chat?”

“And what is it you’d like to discuss?” Anselmo asked.

The hard-knuckled boy rocked on his heels, tense on the verge of his own violence. “Last night during our shift, a little birdy told the sheriff about some keys that were missing.”

“That’s right. I was on custodial duty and I needed the keys to the sheriff’s office. They weren’t in their usual place, so I reported back to let our supervisor know.”

“Okay. Let me ask you a question, smartass.” The old guy showed his crooked teeth. “If you’re so fucking good at your job, you gotta know the answer to this one.”

“Shoot.”

“What do we do to rats?”

Anselmo leaned an elbow on the table. “How would you know?”

“What do you mean by that?” the boy asked, fists tightening.

“You’ve been terrorizing some poor bastards into doing your work and bribing the supe to look the other way. If I’d really wanted to rat you out to the sheriff, you’re damn stupid to think it’d be over this.”

The smile dropped off the old guy’s face. The bald one uncrossed his arms; the hard-knuckled boy stepped forward. 

The usual words had barely left their mouths before Jin had pushed Fen back and jumped to his feet. He heard Anselmo shouting his name, but his hands were already on the boy’s shoulders, shoving him backwards as he aimed a kick to the shin. A hand slammed into Jin’s chest, and Jin reeled, stumbling over the metal seats. The tall bald man grabbed him by the collar, his grip squeezed around Jin’s throat. Suspended against the table, Jin gasped for air.

The old guy’s face slid into view. “Not today,” the old guy admonished, punching his friend’s shoulder, and the grip around Jin’s throat released. He staggered against the hard edge of the table, Anselmo and Fen already there to catch him. “Tomorrow we’ll give them bosses a show, but don’t you dare get us thrown out today.”

“And what are you so fucking afraid of?” Jin shot back, leaning against his friends, pulling on what he had left of breath. “Are you too much of a fucking coward for a friendly fucking chat?”

But the noise in the cafeteria was dying down, and an officer was yelling orders. The three looked on as the Pups beat a hasty retreat to their table on the other side of the room, not even pausing to have the last word. 

“You’re an idiot, Jin,” whispered Anselmo, dropping Jin into his seat like a scolded kitten. 

Jin rubbed his collar. “Probably.”

“You don’t fight guys like them. It only makes things worse.”

Fen stood on the other side of Jin, their hands outstretched as if to spot him.

“You can’t just take it, Preacher,” countered Jin. “Every time. I don’t get how you–”

The presentation was starting. Anselmo returned to his seat, and a hovering Fen clapped Jin on the back for something to do with their hands, and Jin tried not to wince. 

Someone was talking. Anselmo folded his hands and turned attentively to the front of the room, and Fen hurried to their seat and copied his motion, glancing back to make sure the officers were noting their good behavior. Jin folded his arms on the table and rested his head on them. 

One of their teachers was saying something about opportunities beyond the walls of the jail. There was a buzz of applause, which Anselmo and Fen dutifully partook in—different than the usual polite scattered claps. Jin didn’t lift his head.

Now someone else was talking. His throat hurt. An unfamiliar lady was asking them all a gentle question about something they talked about in their classes. His throat really hurt. Several inmates were nodding, more attentive than Jin had ever seen them.

“We’re not all in the same classes,” piped up one rat-faced, riotously chatty young man a few tables in front of Jin. “We have a class here called Pathways for Development, and we learned about different resources. There are about thirty of us in the class.”

“Oh, I see,” said the lady in her soft, clear voice. “Well, then I’m going to talk a little about it for those of you who haven’t—”

“We learned about it in our Health Class, too,” called out another notorious talker, Rat Face’s middle-aged counterpart. “We heard very good things.”

The woman smiled benevolently, and it reminded Jin of the ladies helping out at the free church dinners. “Well, it’s wonderful that most of you already know something about the possibilities. That’s great. We’re going to be showing a video from the fire line–a true story of an inmate who served.”

Right on cue, the teacher rolled in a projector on a squeaky metal cart, and Jin got flashbacks to elementary school.

“While we get that set up,” she continued, “is anyone willing to share how the fires have touched your life?”

Hands went up, Anselmo’s, too, and they crowded Jin’s field of vision, and people talked over each other, and the lady laughed. “One at a time,” she said. As she pointed at someone in the crowd, Jin’s eyes wandered around the cafeteria. One man was employing a matter-of-fact recitation now, but there was also a small ruckus on the other side of the room. An officer was leading in two latecomers—they’d probably been talking to an officer about something—and the tardy boys crossed the cafeteria, whispering something to one another and laughing. A notepad slipped out of one boy’s hand, and he immediately bent down and caught it before it even hit the ground. The other snickered and he grinned and he punched his arm and their heads collided and they were both rubbing their foreheads and laughing quietly before the officer caught up to them in the middle of the room and gave them a stern, quiet telling-off.

“As you all know, our world is burning,” the lady was saying distantly. “No one in this room has been untouched. Now more than ever, we need heroes to guard us from disaster and lead us through the darkness.”

The boys were still laughing as they were sitting down at the table in front of Jin. The overhead lights go out and Jin watches them illuminated in blue against the projector screen and the room wavers with it, the way the air does when heat rises off asphalt.

“This is the story of our martyr. The unknown savior who walked into the fires and never returned. His story is a real-life story of sacrifice and redemption, one that it is my honor to present to you all today.”

The room wavering, the heat rising off asphalt. And maybe it’s because of the memory that arose that the voice wasn’t unexpected, not at first. Or maybe it was just because the voice was so familiar that Jin forgot to be surprised at it.

In any case, when it did finally register, Jin slowly lifted his head to see the man on the screen.

***

“Where are you going?”

“Just follow me!” Jin shouts. The horn lets loose, and the train lurches into motion. Running along the summer morning pavement of the residential street, Jin sprints up to the nearest car, grabbing hold of the ladder and heaving himself onto the platform. He looks back, gripping the frame with both hands. Ace is still behind him.

As Ace pulls himself up, too, Jin ducks between two beams flanking the narrow circular entryway. “We’ll fit,” he calls, the train bucking and shaking under him, the sun punishing his back. He pushes himself in and tumbles into darkness. 

Ace’s peering face swings into focus; a lurch of the train knocks Jin into place.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Ace says. The anxious wobble must be coming from the rattling of the train. 

“What?” says Jin. “You’re already onboard and now you tell me it’s a bad idea, Ace?”

“There isn’t room for both of us.”

“What are you talking about?” Jin reaches forward, grabbing both of Ace’s arms and pulling him in. He falls over Jin, knees knocking knees, Ace’s forehead colliding with Jin’s nose.

“Ow!”

A warm trickle of blood. Ace reaches, sprawled on his knees half on top of Jin, losing the support of his arm.

“You’re bleeding,” Ace says, slipping further.

Jin’s voice comes nasal, his thumb blocking the offending nostril. “And whose fault is that, Ace?”

“Yours.” Ace reaches for a tissue and comes up empty; he staunches the flow with his sleeve, shifting to free his other arm from under Jin, bracing it against the wall. “I told you there wasn’t room." 

“I can’t breathe,” complains Jin, nasal and whiny. The train jolts; Ace’s palm collides into Jin’s vulnerable nose, in turn knocking Jin’s head against the ceiling. “Bastard!”

Ace’s face flashes into light, and the corner of his lip is turned, and he flashes into light again and he’s grinning, and then there they are, spilling laughter on the floor of the compartment.

“I’m sorry,” says Ace, grinning—grinning—his face flashing in and out of the circle of light. The curve of his head sunstruck. “I didn’t mean to.”

“My leg hurts,” Jin complains, cradling his nose, his voice still cartoonish. “Move your foot.”

“Not while you sound like that.”

“I sound like that because of you!”

The track rattles and roars as another train shoots past. Both flinch at once—then the light flashes and their eyes meet and it breaks their laughter open. The collar of Ace’s hazel windbreaker is twisted. Ace’s hair blows messy in the wind, and the train pitches to a shriek.

***

The lights had come back on—too bright—and everyone is talking, talking, a sound that simmers like summer heat under his skin. It’s too hot, and he’s sweating, and his heart shatters its knuckles against his chest.

“You all right, Jin?” asks someone—Anselmo—quietly. 

His face was nearer than it had been before. The officer was yelling something. And around them, people were getting up, hustling to the front of the room.

Jin laughed and rose from his seat, his legs unsteady, pushing against the eager noise that had swallowed him, parsing out what Anselmo had said word by word.

“Ah, it’s nothing,” he says, barely hearing his own voice. He could be whispering or shouting, falling or echoing. 

“The application will be distributed in all classes,” the officer shouted above the noise. “You don’t have to get your copy now.”

Anselmo had been standing over him, it seemed. Now they were walking together. Jin found his voice.

“It’s just—the video they showed. I don’t like fires. They scare the shit out of me.”

“Back in line, back in line.”

“That’s okay.” Fen fell into step beside him. “Me too. Fires freak me out.” It took him a while to realize Fen’s arm was around his shoulders. It was far too hot on his prickling neck, but it was grounding, too—he felt too light, rising with the heat, toward the paper lanterns in the air. “My aunt lost her house in the Harsh Creek fire. She insisted on staying and everything. That lady was a fucking idiot. They had to pluck her out by helicopter. There were pictures of it all over the news, you might’ve even seen it, she looked like something in a claw machine—”

Jin could feel Anselmo’s watchful eyes even as the officer yelled for order, and as they hurriedly wrapped up their conversations, and as they assembled once again in their assigned places.

***

That night in his cell, when he was calm enough to lie down, Jin thought about the mythology book, summoning as many shards of it as he could pull back to himself. A backwards glance. A shaft of light in the fiery dark.

A hand gripping his and not letting go.

***

The train sounds its horn far in the distance, the only sign of civilization. The day before yesterday, they’d hopped out at a small town just off the railroad tracks and kept walking, as the sunset bathed the mountains in orange. And those distant peaks had stayed orange all evening, even as the sunburnt brush, the rusted mining hopper, the ramshackle houses nestled against rocky hills, had all waxed into timelessness and then sunken into shadow. 

“I wonder if that dumpster’s still on fire,” says Jin. 

They’ve been riding the rails—Jin had counted the days at first, but he could no longer say just how long. Only that it’s the end of the season. Summer had lingered long that year, its warmth persisting like an illness. Finally, though, the heat was dropping away, with chilly spells that grew longer and longer, summer sleeping off its fever.

Today, though, is as warm as summer ever was. Now, they’re sitting by what’s left of a rock wall, which divides the field they’re in from a dirt road that no longer remembers the tracks that made it. 

Ace’s smile is always tight, so it would have been tough to tell that anything is wrong—if not for how hard he is gripping Jin’s hand.

“I’m sure they sent a fire crew to put it out,” says Ace, wincing as Jin undoes his old bandages, rinses his wounded arm with the contents of the water bottle. The runoff trickles onto Jin’s hazel windbreaker, which is curled in Ace’s lap. 

“I still can’t believe you scared them off with the threat of an arson charge, Ace,” Jin goes on. “And you lit your jacket on fire right in front of them.” He eases to a finish, setting the water bottle aside, and Ace breathes the smallest sound of relief. “That was so cool.”

He gently loosens his grip on Ace’s hand and reaches into the drug store bag for the ointment and gauze he’d gone into town for, then sets to work on his patient. 

Ace seems to realize what Jin is trying to do by talking so much, and he plays along by adding his own commentary. “The police take arson more seriously than they take anything these days,” he supplies, turning out his arm towards the light of their camping lantern, his jaw set in a hard line made deeper by shadow. “Harmon knew that. He would’ve risked getting charged with murder over getting charged with that.”

Jin begins wrapping the fresh gauze around Ace’s arm. “I would’ve liked to see him serve on one of those prison fire crews. It would've been funny.”

“Hold your breath and it’ll happen soon,” says Ace. “They take whoever they can get.”

Jin doesn’t say anything as he finishes securing the gauze, his gaze drifting to the perpetual sunset over the distant mountains. As they’d learned from their last library stop, the police were hot on Harmon’s trail and could apprehend him any day. They’re close. So close, the commissioner had reassured Ace. Just hang in there, Seo-Jun. Ace had read that with a funny look on his face.

But the thought of Harmon getting just deserts—of himself walking away a free man—no longer carries the dizzying hope it once did. Maybe it’s that he’s never learned how to believe in things like justice and freedom, maybe it’s that he still wonders some days whether Ace and his guys are playing him. Maybe he’s just not particularly eager for a dinner date with some pigs.

He knows what else it is: crouching in the cold summer rain, or turning his face from the wind as he finds his footing, or his feet hitting the pavement until he no longer realizes that he’s running—and a warm night in a dusty field in the middle of nowhere in a burning world—and gripping Ace’s hand and not letting go—he can’t remember ever feeling this much himself, and he’s terrified of what comes after.

Ace is flexing his arm gingerly, then carefully pulling his sleeve back over the bandages. “It’s not that bad. It looks worse than it feels.”

It’s then that Jin notices Ace rolling the jacket string in his fingers. Jin turns to face him and wonders if he is seeing himself mirrored in Ace’s eyes: in the soft lantern light, Ace looks uncharacteristically vulnerable, his eyes downcast, his cuff unbuttoned.

“It looks pretty bad,” says Jin. “But better now.”

“Thank you. You didn’t have to walk all the way back to town.”

“Couldn’t let you get an infection and waste away.” All the doubt in his head has gone away. It always does. “You’re my savior, Ace.” Ace lets out a defeated laugh, and Jin’s chest aches with the ghost of it. “Consider it a repayment of debt.”

Jin realizes that he is staring at the jacket string when Ace looks down, too.

“I stained your jacket,” Ace says. “I’ll make sure to wash it out before I give it back to you.”

The words sink heavy over him. “You don’t have to,” he mutters, taking Ace’s wrist in his hands and fastening his cuff for him.

Ace shakes the water out of the windbreaker, spreads it on the ground, and lies back. Jin looks over, does the same. The rocks dig into his back, and the dry grass tickles his cheek as it stirs in the hot summer wind. But he can’t see the houses anymore, nor the burning mountains: only the high clear stars, hundreds of them, the kind of summer sky that makes you long for the old gods you don’t remember.

He flexes his hand. It’s sore where Ace’s fingers had been hooked around his. “We haven’t had a destination in a while, Ace.”

“No.”

“I guess it doesn’t matter.” He’s pushing. He knows he is. “Your guys will be here before we know it, and that’ll be that.” He’s touching his own bruise; he’s asking a question that won’t be answered. 

“I’m sure it’ll be a relief to both of us for this nightmare to be over,” says Ace, only a voice, and the empty space around it suddenly hurts so much that Jin has to turn to look at him. He sees Ace looking back, his face soft and curious in the lantern light. Jin knots his fingers around the ache and turns his eyes back to the sky. 

“I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you right away,” Jin says. “About the store person.”

Jin had been counting out the payment when the drug store cashier looked twice at him, tucking a strand of hair behind their ear. Some people came by. They were looking for two guys. Said one might be injured. Their nose stud was a small friendly gleam. You kind of fit the description of the other guy. 

“You were right,” says Ace. “I couldn’t have gone far in my condition. Spending another night here was our only choice.”

“I still should’ve told you.” There’s more that Jin isn’t telling, but he isn’t about to say it, even as he seeks forgiveness for it. No, no, they didn’t look anything like that. Not one of those gangster types. They finished bagging his goods and looked at him sideways. I wouldn’t really know for sure, but they seemed like cops.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” says Ace, and the guilt burrows deeper—the unease, the doubt, too—but Jin laughs through it.

“I’ve never been told that in my life.”

Ace scoffs quietly. “Do you get a kick out of making trouble?”

“No,” says Jin to the stars. He bends a knee, scuffs at the dirt with the heel of his shoe. “I just never knew what else to do, and now I don’t know how to do anything else.”

The wind gentles to a soft stirring of grass, and Ace doesn’t respond for a long while.

“Are you going to get back in trouble?”

“I want to say no.”

“I could talk to the force, if you wanted.”

Jin laughs. “And ask them for what?”

“I don’t know. They might know something. They helped me.”

“I wouldn’t want their help, anyway. Whatever their idea of help is.” Jin stretches out both legs again. He turns his head just a little, just enough to make Ace turn to him, too. “Just don’t sell me out to them when this is all over and that’ll be good enough.”

Ace shakes his head slightly as he looks away. “I told you I’m not going to do that.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll make do, Ace,” says Jin. He looks up at the moon, just shy of its circle, lifts his right hand to tell whether it’s waxing or waning. “I always do.”

Jin is wide awake; he couldn’t rest even if he wanted to. But the lull in the wind and the warm stillness on the grass and the high drift of his thoughts—space between them, like all those stars—they’re something like sleep, and it takes Ace’s voice to rouse him.

“Where do you want to go?” asks Ace.

“What?”

“You said we haven’t had a destination in a while. Is there somewhere you would want to go?”

“Arizona,” Jin replies.

He hears Ace chuckle. “Try a different letter of the alphabet.” 

Jin laughs, too, resting his hands on his stomach. “I don’t know.” He had forgotten how to want things. “Maybe Nevada?”

Out of his peripheral version, he sees the man turn his head to look at him. “Anywhere in the world, and you choose Nevada?”

“It’s the first place I could think of,” giggles Jin. “Okay, okay, I’ll try harder.” He plucks a blade of grass and spins it in his hands, then turns to look at Ace doubtfully. “Anywhere in the world?”

Ace’s uninjured arm lifts in an accommodating gesture. Jin looks back up at the sky, the faces of its gods.

“I think I’d go in a book,” says Jin. “A book I had as a kid.”

“What was it about?”

“Some Greek myth. Orpheus and Eurydice.”

The crickets sound their bright, mournful cry. “I’ve heard about them,” says Ace. “The musician who followed his lover to the Underworld so he could lead her out again.”

“Yeah. That wasn’t the part I really remember, though. It was the pictures.”

Jin doesn’t know how to describe them, so he sits up, and Ace follows his lead. Jin pulls the pharmacy receipt out of his pocket, scoots closer to the circle of light from the camping lantern. The insects frisk about it, casting their dancing shadows on the wall. With his knees tented and his leg for a drawing surface, Jin fills the bottom of the receipt with ink—trees, mountains, done messy and faithful in the lantern’s faux orange sunset.

They both gaze at it when he’s done, and Ace considers.

“It looks almost like a place I knew,” he says.

“Where?”

Ace wordlessly reaches over, his face shadowed, his hands asking a question. Jin passes him the receipt. But Ace wants the pen, too, and Jin gives it to him, and Jin follows his hands as he works. His strokes are attentively brisk, elegant, even, and around Jin’s triangular peaks, a mountain range arises. Amidst the scrawl of Jin’s trees, a river appears, and a cabin. 

“I couldn’t tell you where,” says Ace. “I was too young. Somewhere up north, in the mountains. My family came here during the summers. I still remember exactly what it looked like.”

Jin gazes at the drawing, at the cabin’s wide porch and sloping roof. “Did they stop going?” 

“Something happened.” Ace crosses his legs and folds his hands. “Harmon was involved. My parents ran with him, too. Until they ran afoul of him. I went to foster care, like you.”

Jin thinks of a million questions, but he doesn’t know which one to ask. Instead, he tugs the receipt out from under Ace’s hands. He holds it closer to the lantern, studying every line.

“This is exactly what it looks like?” 

“Every detail.” Ace puts his finger on one part of the drawing. “If you walk down from the cabin to the river, you can see these two little mountains that look just like cat ears.” He traces downwards. “Then down the hill, there’s a group of big trees twisted into bowing by the wind, right where the river splits in three.”

Jin points to another part of the picture, his hand bumping Ace’s.

“What’s here?”

“I called that the ‘chimney mountain.’ It sticks straight up. You can see it from anywhere on the mountain, so once you find it, you know exactly where you are. You could sometimes see snow on it, even in summer.”

“What about this?’

“The lake. I was never allowed near it. There were big slippery rocks on the banks. I was told I’d fall in and then keep falling. You’ve never seen anything so blue.”

Jin smiles. “This?” he asks innocently, and Ace laughs.

“A mistake,” he admits. “I left my pen there too long and it blotted.”

The wind blows through the brush, through the empty ache in Jin’s chest. “How ‘bout we go there, Ace?”

He hears Ace shifting, the grass rustling. “It’s just a memory.” 

“You said ‘anywhere,’” reminds Jin. He turns the receipt in his hands. He’s just playing along with the game. “This is kind of like a map, isn’t it?”

“What? Are you going to check every hill north of the valley?”

Jin’s still pushing, pressing into the tenderness of the wound. “Don’t joke about that. I just might do it. Then what?”

“Then you’d be wasting your time.”

“Well, that’s up to me, isn’t it?”

And Ace is leaning forward, too, his shoulder brushing Jin’s as they both look down at the picture in Jin’s hands. He laughs, soft and disbelieving. 

“All right, then. If we get separated,” Ace begins, saying his words and meaning them, “let’s meet in the mountains.”

Jin looks past Ace’s hands, past the dancing illuminated circle on the wall, past the darkened road and the hills and the plains that stretch on forever, to where the lines of faint fire on the mountains make their own constellations. He imagines they are at the ends of the earth, and he is seeing where the stars fall. 

He lies back again, holding the receipt to his chest. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many stars,” Jin says. Ace is lying back, too, and his arm is warm against Jin’s, and the backs of their knuckles knock together. Ace is breathing a laugh, and Jin feels it in his own stomach.

“Wait until the mountains.”

***

It didn’t come together quickly, but the first step was on the way to dish disposal, when Jin mustered up the courage to ask Anselmo how to sign up for library time. He’d worried the ex-preacher would read too much significance into this, but the man received his question easily.

“Library time, huh?” asked Anselmo, scraping crumbs into the trash. “You thinking of keeping me company in my college classes, Jin?”

Jin leaned against the wall. “I don’t know. I just wanted to know how.”

“Sure,” said Anselmo. “Well, you’ve asked the right man.”

He needed Anselmo’s help for the next part, too. Jin had nearly hit his monthly spending limit at commissary, and since poor Fen was still shut out from the gates of heaven, he needed every cent that he had left. So, one afternoon, he leaned over the checkers board toward Anselmo, everything inside him fraught and buzzing.

“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” Jin said, on the tail end of an entirely separate thought. “I really need a new notebook. It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn. I’m not that good, but I miss it.” He tried not to stare at the bruise on the ex-preacher’s cheek, the way it made a hollow there.

Anselmo pondered the board, then advanced his chosen piece. “You’re going to be hard-pressed to find a sketchbook in this place, but they do sell notepads at commissary.”

“Ah, I’m about to hit my spending limit. I’m not the best with money. I guess I made some bad moves.” 

Jin slid a red piece all the way across the board towards him, skimming past all the empty squares.

“That’s against the rules,” said Anselmo mildly, reaching out for the piece himself, moving it to the very edge of the board. “You know, you can only move this way—” He slid the piece back across. “Or that.”

“My bad,” said Jin. “How’s this?” He picked it up and set it decisively on one of the squares Anselmo indicated. 

There were no longer postage stamps underneath it. Anselmo nodded at him.

Several nights later, when he relieved Anselmo for custodian duty and went to collect the bathroom trash, there was a little something extra at the bottom of the bin. 

***

So it began. Jin had a thousand roads to follow and to abandon and to take up again. But in there, time was all he had. Jin thought about it, hard; he stared at pictures in library books; he wore through the state atlas; he lost sleep; he nearly lost his mind. The picture resolved itself slowly, coming into focus.

He began to draw the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was simple enough.

Jin carried on night after night, working by the dim light from the window. Trees, rivers, mountains. Fire and darkness. The one who survives and the one he lost. Hands gripping each other and not letting go.

Jin has moments just before sunrise when he simply stares at his work, tired and bright-eyed, his hand smudged with black ink. It’s as if the knees of his heart are buckling.

If you would like to take be involved in justice reform and help those affected by incarceration in the Bay Area, please consider getting involved with De-Bug San Jose, which focuses on criminal justice reform, economic justice, housing, and immigrant rights:

Audio Credits:

Recorded in Logic Pro X.

Plug-ins used: iZotope Ozone 9 Elements and Neutron 3 Elements, Valhalla DSP Shimmer and Supermassive

Sounds used: Microcassette recordings of a Railroad deep in Highway 70 [the site of the beginning of the Camp Fire of 2018.], Cellphone recordings of the Ocean using a Droid Razr (circa 2015), Cellphone recordings of an open flame burner on a stove in Parkmerced (circa 2014), Condenser Mic Recording of a Wood Frog Instrument, office chair wheels, a pen/pencil writing in a leather notebook, and the flipping of pages of a story book, Direct Recordings of an American Professional Jaguar by Fender through a Scarlett 18i20 interface.

We would like to thank History San José for hosting this installation. History San José preserves and enriches the cultural heritage of San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley through research, collections, partnerships, educational programs and events.. To find out more about what they do, visit their website.

SJ Sounds is a collaboration between More Más Marami Arts and Soundplay.Media. This installation is possible thanks to funding from the City of San José through the Abierto program, the support of our fiscal sponsor, The School of Arts and Culture.