In a room that’s panther black and blizzard frigid, there’s a man hunched over his snapping fingers. The middle rests for a moment on the thumb and the peaks of the prints scratch together like sandpaper before the longer of the two slams down with mad might sending the shorter up and to the side. As the tall man slides across the tip of the pollex, the topmost digit bends and the small connecting area between it and the second highest grows increasingly sore, as does the meaty patch of palm just above the wrist. The snapping persists despite the ache because, without the crack, it’s just the spilled ink.

The atmosphere grows into its own person that crouches in one of the corners as the man stumbles around until his toes find his blanket. He crashes like a diving bird with a broken wing and wool scratches at raw skin as he curls up like a shivering fetus on his left side. Soon, the quiet starts sneaking out of its corner like a snake towards a field of mice. With his left arm curled to cradle his head like a dead infant being hugged by its grieving mother, he moves his right hand up to the side of his skull to snap directly into his ear, but his rattling icicles keep striking it, delivering a sharp impact of freezing flesh. He stops and guides his right hand down to cup his shriveled scrotum so his withdrawn member might provide some warmth.

Something strokes his foot.

It’s warm and his blood runs cold.

He starts kicking and hears a holler. He gets up and starts flailing his arms this way and that, dancing madly. His big toe hits the bucket and is met with two cries: the note of a struck gong, and the crack of a snapped pencil. He goes down, tears starting to well, but his body shoots up from the gelid slab like a magnet repulsed by its twin. The adrenaline races through his veins hot and thin as a molten copper wire, breeding fierce tremors. Wartime drums rattle in his ears; they beat and pound with the energy of a stocky chef tenderizing a slab of bloody grub. There’s an odd shuffling noise, but he can’t tell where it came from.

“ You get the fuck out here! ” he yells. A scratchy bark from disuse and circumstance, his voice tears through his mouth with rough force and he’s surprised that the uneven, cracking burst didn’t take any blood or teeth with it.

“Y-you’re a person?” a young voice, soft and trembling like a plucked leaf.

“Yeah.” The syllable crawls out with the caution of a mole poking its nose out of its hill. “I’m sorry man, I didn’t mean to scare you. I don’t know how I got here. I woke up and there was this weird, dull snapping. I moved around and I felt your heel and you were so cold I thought you were a corpse and then you moved and I didn’t mean to yell or anything but I don’t know where I am or why I can’t see or where my clothes are or where my hair went-”

“Hey, it’s okay kid,” His voice is still sandpaper and the raises of his gooseflesh still tremble, but his heart begins to settle. “I can’t answer most of those, but they shaved my head and took my clothes too. What’s your name son?”

“Ron.”

“Ron, I’m Arthur.”

“Hey Art,” there’s a pause and Arthur revels in the sound of this kid’s breathing. “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know. Awhile.”

“What’s that smell?”

“My piss bucket. But I guess it’s our piss bucket now,” He pauses to let the kid chuckle, but silence is all he meets. “I’m sorry I swore at you. I thought, well, honestly I don’t know what I thought.”

“You’re good, man. I’m just glad you’re not a zombie or something.”

“There’s a blanket over here. It’s not much for warmth, but it’s better than the floor.” “Any food?”

“Not now, but they drop off a tray every now and then.” “So what now?”

Arthur goes quiet. All his body hair’s frozen up, his fingers have a mind of their own, his teeth clash violently despite attempts to steady his jaw. He can’t find an answer

. . .

“I probably could’ve made it into the uni, but I wanted to be in my brother’s life, you know?” The two sit huddled like penguins up against the wall furthest from the bucket’s corner. The blanket covers them both in an itchy hug, and they have their arms around each other. “It would just be easier to go to the community because it was so much closer.”

“I can respect that. I don’t have any brothers, but I have an older sister I’d do anything for. Hey son, so I’ve thought about it a little more. They shaved my head before they put me in here, but it’s grown almost to like I had it, so I’ve probably been stuck here a month.”

“Shit man, what do you do?”

“I play with myself,” Arthur states plainly, the way he used to ask cashiers how their days were, and the kid can’t contain himself. After a few warm moments, silence drifts back in. As Ron wipes his tears, Arthur’s voice gains a tad more heft. “Joking aside, I don’t, well, can’t really do anything. I daydream.”

“What about?”

“Escape and revenge, hot food and warm beds. All the clichés, you know? But lately, it’s just been how I’d kill myself.”

Silence crashes like a man learning to fly. The two hostages squeeze each other, their breath warming skin that feels frostbitten. After what is either ten minutes or two hours, they spoon on the ground and sleep. Arthur wakes first. He moves in a drunken mamba to the bucket, his urine slamming against the edge with a harsh clanging, and then resumes his madcap movement trying to scan the floor with his feet in order to see if there’s a tray. He bumps into uncaring walls and nearly falls a few times, but towards the wall furthest the blanket, he finds a tray. It was a sharp surprise to his big toe that reminded him of when he put on a boot as a boy and met a scorpion. He bends over, the knobs on his bare back playing their song as he did, and raises it up with his left. He runs his right hand over it. Two loaves of stale bread, a petite cup of lukewarm water with little bits swirling around his investigating finger.

He wakes the boy.

“Soup’s on son.”

“What?”

“Our friends left us some bread and a little water. I wouldn’t wolf it down; it’ll be a while before they bring more.”

They sit and munch, cold bone compressing overstored bread. They each eat about half an inch off the top of their loaves which just barely fit into their closed hands. They each take a few sips from the container that either one could fit in their stinking mouths.

“Man, I don’t know how long I can stand this. How about we sleep in shifts but act like we’re both asleep. Eventually, they’ll come in when one of us is awake, and then we can jack’em up.”

“I tried that. I probably went, I don’t know, two or three days where I’d just lay there, stabbing myself in the thigh with my nails to keep myself awake. But they know. I couldn’t fight sleep off anymore, and when I woke up, they brought just a little more bread than usual. It was like they were trying to tell me that they knew.”

“Do they only walk in to bring food?”

“Sometimes they clean the bucket or leave a new roll next to it.” “Do you have any idea who they are?”

“No. The last thing I remember, I had one too many after my daughter said goodbye for a school in Louisiana. I woke up cold, thinking I drunk myself blind. I’ve been alone ever since.”

“How’d you keep from going crazy?”

“Before you showed up, I think I was about as close to the deep end as you can get without going under.”

Time passes with its perfect impersonal rhythm. Eventually, their food was gone and the bucket was about half filled. The cup of water had long since been emptied and put in the same corner where the tray would rest until the next time it was replaced.

“Art man, you can’t just treat people like this.”

“Yet here we are.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Old habits tilt his head up in an attempt to look in eyes he had no way of peering into.

“I’ve been here awhile son. I’ve screamed and I’ve begged and prayed. It’s wrong and there’s nothing we can do about it. I’ve been over every inch of wall and I can’t find a crack. If they don’t let us out or starve us, we’ll probably grow old here unless we bite our wrists or drown ourselves in piss,” The boy digs his face into the man’s stubbled neck and his entire body begins to rack frantically with sobs. “Yes, I’ve done that too.”

. . .

When their stomachs cry in agony, they wake to something new. Ron is first; he struggles up to use the bucket.

Noting its vacancy, he sweeps with his left foot. His toes hit something hard, something wood. He reaches down towards it with his right hand. As he wonders why they had a wooden tray this time, his fingertips caress the grooved section his toe hit. He moves his fingers to find that he can grasp his fingers around it with ease. As his right hand holds tight, he moves his left around the cold, smooth protrusions and an image of what he’s holding forms in his mind’s eye.

He’s holding an archaic cowpoke revolver.

The thought makes its home on the gun’s barrel and adds a weight that almost makes him drop it. His first thought is to drop it, but he knows that wouldn’t do any good. It would just land with a thud and be a problem they couldn’t avoid. Art would know what to do. He walks over and shakes him out of his dreams so he can face this with him. When he sits up, Ron moves in real close and Arthur wraps the blanket around him.

“Did they leave a tray?”

“N-no.”

“What’s wrong kid?”

“Th-they left a gun,” Ron reaches for and gropes Art’s hand; he takes the mass and sets it against his palm and hopes that he never has to hold it again. Oiled metal slides and the motions birth clicks.

“There’s only one bullet in it.”

“Wh-what do you think it’s for?”

Arthur says exactly what Ron thought as he walked over to wake him up.

. . .

There’s a prisoner gripping a pistol with all his sapped on the ice floor that he’s grown to hate and ignore in equal measure. It feels like someone stuck blinding fury and passive indifference into a blender and the ghastly combination has slipped its way into the folds of his brain and rubbed the gray matter roughly and vigorously. It’s a maddening feeling and he yearns for it to be gone.

They haven’t gotten any more bread, but there’s been water, so their intent couldn’t be more crystal. It’s a show they’re looking for.

While the kid sleeps and his body starts to miss the slice of warmth normally beside it, he moves the hostile tool to his mouth, points it up at the arid roof. His emaciated hand wants to fall limp like a dead dog but this has got to be done so rusted joints force their way past the primitive self-preservation trying to kill the thought before it kills him.

It’s on his tongue. He thinks of his daughter, then looks in the direction of the sleeping boy. He pulls the hammer down towards the webbing of his thumb, and then he tugs the trigger back.

A dragon’s roar blows brain and life out of from the back of a shivering skull.

It wakes the boy and before his toes touch warm sponge, he knows that he’ll be sleeping alone. He tries to ignore the body until sleep finally steals a few hours and when he wakes up, the corpse and the empty gun are gone. There’s fresh bread and a large bottle with crisp, clean water. There’s also something on the metal tray he never heard Art talk about.

There’s a chunk of thick, salted meat. It doesn’t taste like any he’s had before, but he does not dwell on this. His cries, which bellow like a wounded tomcat’s, grow louder with each new cut.

– Brayden Kennedy