The Whole Damned World

     The setting for my life is a 12 by 12 cell. It’s got windows, you know, so I can see a bird walk or a man die a slow-quick death. That’s mostly what I do; I look out my windows and look at the world running by. That’s right, I said running. Don’t nobody walk these days, not from what I can see anyway. I don’t do much myself so I can’t say why it is they do or don’t.
     I think I can leave my cell when I want, but I don’t try. These windows ain’t barred and the sunlight don’t have no qualms about makin’ himself at home in my world so I expect I got it pretty good and well right where I am. Can sit on my head and read a book if I want, I can love myself and hate everybody else. Thrice a day that big ole guard comes by and gives me my food. I eat it most the time. There’s about four hundred of us all told; I’ve never seen ‘em, but the Old Sack says he hears ‘em wailing in the middle of the night while I sleep. See I gotta sleep my good 10 hours a night or I start seein’ good inside out and bad upside down. Been in here now since hairs was on my face. Long time to think of.  Make a man start remembering black and white instead of colors.
     Me and the Old Sack, we sit up all day by these windows watching these marathon runners. They all in love with these little screechin’ beetles they hold up to their heads while they run, but they never bump into all these others. Like, almost, they hung up on some old clothesline like mama had and just getting’ pulled along on a track so they don’t even need to think about where they go. But where they go? The Old Sack says they don’t go nowheres, just like me an’ him, but I think they got homes and jobs and families and all that stuff to set places on fire with life. Yeah, I think everybody running to get to that fire life, that ugly beautiful real they live. That’s the stuff the Old Sack don’t have, I don’t have neither. We just kinda sit and watch all the hat-tippers and change-counters do their thing. Watch them boogie-woogie on Saturday night, shuffle all solemn-like on Sunday morn, off to apologize for barrel-housin’ like God was their man or woman. The Old Sack got a funny laugh when he see them walkin’ those days, like he’s gonna laugh all the breath out of him. We laugh good and hard Sunday morn, like we’s livin’ our fire life those times.
    I’ve seen a whole batch of lifetimes run by these windows. Babies bounce off concrete still covered in that sticky, clear life their mommas give ‘em to slide along easy like those fancy cars that almost run ‘em over. Those ladies who got enough beauty to make God hisself change religions come every now and then, smelling something lovely like they gathered up all the goodness there is and wear it on them. Once, though, I seen one of them ladies get roughed up something nasty by two of those no-goods you see when you think of what a no-good look like. Made me think thoughts they say I shouldn’t, ‘bout the kind of revenge I shouldn’t be takin’, they say. The Old Sack calmed me down, though, and next we see an old gray man give this young green girl a bag of sweet candies. Me an’ the Old Sack get to talking and we decide there’s good and there’s evil and there’s somethin' in between them two, but we ain’t got no name for it.
    See we play games in the drinking dark, that dark that just drink up everything in the world. Some nights we play chess in our heads or we play games of thinking of our black-n-white lives. My black-n-white life weren’t bad, but weren’t good either. My daddy never beat me, mama never did. Nobody yelled, but nobody loved. That’s what makes me think there’s somethin’ in between good and evil, almost like nothing, but like everything.
     Like me an’ the Old Sack, here, we don’t got good, but we don’t got evil. What we got a lot of people might say is nothing, but my windows give us near everything. We gets the stink of life and death so bad it creeps into your bones, screams so loud you can’t hear anything.  The whole damned world lines up nice and neat at my windows and comes in real polite-like. Yeah, we got everything.