The first guard shift happened around midday. I could tell the second man was heavier than the first, his steps left a much thicker noise against the steel grate. I followed his shadow. By noon the second shift had occurred. Another man, this one thinner and much easier against the steel. This is how I spent my days the rest of the week now with the knowledge that I would not have another meeting with Ritcher. Here in my little hole, waiting for the prison keeps to push me any which way. Speculating over their forms through noise and shadow. I sat at an angle against a little knob of stone, sitting on the base of my ass watching.

  Little conversations muffled behind rain. Rain that seeped through the gaps and spilled against my face and streamed down my cheeks. Muffling the noise with the prittle-prattle. The water filled to my knees and I raised my feet and extended them out to the near wall against me, there I embedded myself. Still watching, still listening. Not sleeping in fear of falling into the water.

  They took us out of the holes the next day for “showers”. I had crust in my eyes, blood shot and red and tired. One guard only for this job.

  That made a total of three different watch-shifts, two single guard ones and one single guard one.

We did the routine; me taking the bucket and putting on my cuffs and being lifted out through chain. Me standing tall and ready for position to be against the line. Squeezed in, following close the other prisoners towards the shower lines. This routine. No other. This way. No other. Prisoners with their own tired looks, some falling asleep as they woke and being hit in the back of the knee. The broken ones accepting the beating with a servile moan, the others turning their head and growling or snapping. You almost forget in all your isolation in that little hole how much everyone hates this place. The political prisoners. The murderers. The war criminals. All of us here and desperate and bitter.

  I believe the expectation when they decapitated Chaucer would be that we’d all give up. What a disappointment it must have been after the fact.

  We walked down steps at the perimeter of the copula, down into the lower chambers of Shrieker’s Veil. There were holes and patches against the walls down the steps we traveled, gaps boarded up or safeguarded with rope and wire. Netting that no one dared test the integrity of. It was still raining in the morning. That’s the only reason we had these showers in the first place, they wanted that cold ocean sprinkle against us. They wanted the whole world against us.

  We went in single file and stripped our clothes into a barrel. Each of us with the same rags made it an efficient thing to pick out after the showers. The only thing you were really gambling on was the scent of your clothes. Twenty men were in front of me before it was my turn. The guard stared at me as I raised the clothes up and past my neck. He inspected my body, not with desire, so much as curiosity as to why I still had definition. Why there was a bicep and chest muscle. Why my legs seemed bigger than they should be. Why I still looked fed.

  Fed. The real confusion. Feedings at only twice (small meals, to boot!) a week should have left me drained like the rest of them. If that were the case, if I had only been eating twice a week. If I hadn’t spent my time with Ritcher or his plants, in a private room to train at least my physique (weaponry had been a difficult thing to come by, inside men or not).

  He flicked a finger and I turned into the shower with the rest. There were forty men after me. About the hundred of us each moved up against a cobblestone wall. The walls so dilapidated that we had to find spots on the wooden patchwork. We placed our hand firm against the indents. There were plenty in the room, where the stone was a little curled and bundled, where bits of nails and black spots covered the spot on the wall. We exposed our backs and took deep breaths. The guards pooled buckets together. Some with salt water, others with piss, others with shit. They liked it this way. They were going to clean us anyway. Why not spray us down and shame us. It was a past time. Some of them started early, gripping the buckets and throwing them from a distance. Laughing. Turning away with their noses pinched. It always started from the right to the left.

They approached me and braced for the cold. My feet firm in the stone.

  But something of a peculiarity, a rarity happened. One of the prisoners ahead had gotten off the wall. He stood. A lanky fellow, quite tall. Not one I was familiar with or even knew.

Stolen story; please report.

  “No more.” He whispered to himself.

  “On the wall.” The guards had said.

  No more he repeated. On and on, droning. On the wall they responded. Three guards approaching him and putting their hands on his shoulders. He struck one of them across the face. Which of course forced the others to extend their blades to him.

  I’d almost forgot that I wasn’t alone in my contempt. That there were many with many more years and many more scars, with a whole life’s history on this island and with an aged kind of hate.

  The other prisoners started to cheer. Some were sprayed with buckets of water. The guards approached us on the wall. A look of fear and hope.

  I wondered if Chaucer inspired this?

  The man next to me had his hand gripped into a punch.

I thought why not lead the rebellion this way? Why not commit to it here and now? That was until I looked at the exit. And the funneling of guards. The timing was just terrible. There was no way out but that single hall and no way to fight them all off. Not with a hundred weak men. Some of them already broken down and on the floor surrendered. The guard came up to the first man. He paused in front of his face and observed him for a bit, inspecting his personhood. He took out his sheathed blade and smacked him across the face with the blunt of it. It bruised him and the man attacked. Four other prisoners looked at each other and sprung. Each going for a guard. One of them - close to me - lunged at a guard. I moved a bit, and in the movement, put my foot on the attackers legs and tripped him over the guard. Such that they both fell. And me on top of them. They rolled and eventually rolled on me. A wad of meat, as other prisoners came along to intercept us. But there were more that joined. Two more guards. Three more prisoners. All of us scrambling and my hands fumbling in between. I breathed out, as if I was drowning and returned back into the fray.

  My hands moved for the guards keys I grabbed them and ripped it from a steel ring on his waist. I took the whole leather belt with him, and tore it off so that only the rings remained. I gripped them. Being throw about, being smacked by prisoner or guard. I gripped them and rolled around and watched to see where we would go.

  The riot had already gone full swing though.

  The prisoners wanting peace were already in their corners, huddling and watching. A great majority of us had decided to fight though. Someone stood me up. I punched a guard. Knocked him out. Another guard swung at me, I leaned back and struck him.

  Tempting to get the knife. Tempting to kill them all. A feeling intense in my gut. Instead I moved and went to the edge of the walls, grabbing hold of a guards neck and dragging him. I smacked his face against the walls and kept at it until his helmet was dented in. And while I was there, at that wall, I lodged the keys in a small gap in the wood. This was that aforementioned ruined wall, the cheaply-repaired wall. The one full of planks and wires and bent screws. It led out to the sky, down to the ocean floor. A high-hole in Shrieker’s Veil.

I hid the keys, there was a hold big enough for my hand.

  The ring stuck to a large nail on the other side. Now I’d just have to pray that storm wouldn’t know them away.

  I freed my hand and went back to smacking the guard. Another had come around to hit me with his boot. He pinned my face against the floor and revealed his blade to my neck. My hands raised, I breathed heavy and stared at the edge.

  “You move and I take your eyes.” He said.

  The other prisoners were being pushed back by now. All I could do was look as the prisoners were snuffed, the fire in their hearts fading with each exhausted breath. Guards tackled them with their armored shoulders, kept them crushed between the wall and the metal armor.

  One prisoner scrambling for a weapon managed to unsheathe it. As he turned, a blade ran through his chest. From his back. He dropped the blade and looked down, eyes twitching. I believe that was about the time the riot stopped. When that body fell stiff on the floor and all of us watched the blood run out of it.