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Inception's Death Row
"Whatcha go by,
man?" the barred prisoner in the second cell asked the silent, faceless
man occupying the first. It had been only a short while since the unspoken-one was
led to his cell past the other confined prisoners, cloaked in a black hood, the
very next subject in line to meet his fate along the infamous Inception's Death
Row.
"J," the
hooded man replied, eyes cast down as he sat brooding in the far corner of the
cell. His knees were drawn to his chest and his arms wrapped around them as if
to comfort himself.
"What's zat stand
for," the second barred man asked. He tapped his fingers on the narrowly
spaced black metal bars of his vault as he impatiently waited for a reply. In
truth, he had nothing better to do.
"James Styles,"
the despondent black man mumbled after a pause. "James Edward
Styles."
"Name's
Alvin," the second man smirked, gripping the steel. He let out a
half-hearted chuckle. "Guess we lost the appeal, huh, man?"
Styles' remained silent, determined to fix his mind on the
here-and-now, instead of the immediate future. They'd come for him any moment,
and lead him to The Chamber, a place he nightmarishly imagined for the past six
months. And now he'd come to his final hour.
"Cheer up," Alvin turned and paced his barren
cell, aware of his predecessor's condition. "Cain't be all dat bad on the
other side. "Hmhhh," he flexed his dark, ringed, muscular neck.
"Might be surprised."
Styles' looked up to say something, but then returned his
eyes to the grey floor.
"Who yo' people?" Alvin paused to break the
silence.
"Mama gone have me at fi'teen, hooked on that crack.
Ain't got no daddy 'round--" He stopped and shook his head, choked up
somewhere deep in his throat. He edgily rocked himself back and forth.
"Just don't seem right."
"Know whatcha
mean," Alvin made his way back to the bars. "All our people up in
here-black people-up and down dis block and everybody got the same lame story. Mus'
be some kind of conspiracy or som'in."
Hearing the frustration
in his neighbor's voice eased some of Styles' own angst. Cast in a fishers' net
they were, all looking to escape a fate that began and ended on Inception's
Death Row, over and over again.
"Be a whole lot
easier if somethin' better was waitin' on the other side," Styles' spoke.
"Right now seems like we step from one hell right into the next."
"Got that
right," Alvin sighed. "Shoot! Up to me, I'd stay here forever. I mean
it's hot; don't go wantin' for nothin'. This's real livin'."
"So much for the
afterlife," the hooded-one rested his back against the wall. "Ask me,
dead should be dead-straight up."
"I here you,"
Alvin nodded. "I here you, brotha."
Suddenly, a severe contracting pain struck in the pit of
James Styles' stomach. He felt queasy, on the verge of blacking out. It was
then that he knew that his end was near, and he rolled himself onto the fetal
position, groaning loudly in pain.
Being next to the first
cell, Alvin had heard the terrible moans before. He backed away from the metal
bars and nervously paced the floor. Down the endless stretch of cellblocks
lining Inception's Death Row, he could hear the cords of restless agitation
that rang every time one of their own neared the final transition. In only
twenty-eight days, he'd be moved over and face the labor of death himself. The
thought alone was nearly unbearable.
"Don't fight it,
brotha," Alvin spoke above the clamoring. "Try to roll wit it."
"Hurts,"
Styles' rolled around to his back. The dark hood still enveloped his face,
making his tortured expressions invisible.
From the back of his
cell, Alvin's ears next detected the ominous rattling of the chains dragged by
Inception's encroaching henchmen. So ruthlessly they arrived, never a second
late to escort the prisoner to The Chamber. As they passed along the dark
corridors, the agitation amongst the prisoners grew louder. Alvin tightly shut
his eyes as they passed. He fiercely avoided any glimpse of their faces until
the moment of his own final hour.
Meanwhile, a key was
used to unlock Styles' cell as the clamoring about reached a peak. Three guards
entered, hovering in pyramidal formation. They found him in the corner, doubled
over in pain as the sharp spasms came more frequently. "Please," he
muttered as they lifted him to his feet, bound him in shackles, and placed a
blindfold over his eyes.' "Just-just one more day."
Voiceless, they ignored
his request and led him from the cell to The Chamber. It was an unspeakable
place, one that not even the most hardened prisoner could stand. From there,
things went quickly; a constricting force overtook his body, followed by sweats
and a sense of intense suffocation. Then came his final breaths, followed by
loud, gut-wrenching hollers that were not his own. Finally, his eyes met the
most intense of bright lights and he heard from his mouth a strange squeal as
he crossed over to the other side.
And there he arrived at
3: 17 a. m., delivered by a pair of sterile gloved hands. A nurse claimed his
six-month premature body and carried it over to the nearby incubator.
"Plan on giving
this boy a name," a worried-looking physician asked the restless mother,
only fifteen, as he slowly pushed valium into her vein to quell the effects of
cocaine in her system.
"James," she huffed, cutting her eyes at the NYC
emergency physician's badge that bore the name. "That good enough?"
"Father's name,
Ms. Styles?" he asked.
She stubbornly turned
her head away.
The doctor looked up at
the social worker who'd just entered the room. "Then James Styles it is."
He shook his head.
Wesley L. Leigh holds both a Baccalaureate in psychology as well as an M.D. degree from the University
of Washington in Seattle. He currently serves as chief of ER at an Atlanta hospital and has
worked as a stadium physician for the Atlanta Braves. During his undergraduate years,
he self-published a Minority Premedical Guide (MPG) distributed to multiple California State
and Community college campuses. In the past year, his work has been published in Things That Go Bump,
an anthology, Wild Violet, an online literary magazine, and is forthcoming in BIGnews,
a publication with a circulation of 30, 000. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America.
Email Wesley L. Leigh
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