By Leah Berry
It was a prison cell. Muted colours danced to their mundane songs, in a dull ballroom decorated by suffocating curtains that solidified the confinements of the isolated cell. As usual, he longingly peered out of the cell coverage made of cotton and the bars, clinging to the wasted window, screaming in a silent plea to be broken.
Daylight streamed through them, but he didn't bask in the glory for long: like a vampire, he avoided the sun, knowing he would desperately long for freedom if a single ray touched his ghostly skin. With only the fake, sunken flowers on the white washed curtains for company, the boy drew further and further and further into his deep, psychological despair.
Silent and broken, the boy tried to talk to himself to find his voice trapped in his throat: 'ironic' he thought. Unfortunately he kept his tears locked up. Despondently, he did loops infinitely around the perimeter before he grew bored of that then sat down, to do it all again. Resigned to his fate, the boy had settled well into this routine. Like an unrecorded death, his name became forgotten to even him as he hadn't spoken it in years.
Continuing down this path, the boy was lead to this day. Like first reading about a villain, he knew his happily ever after would never arrive. Whenever he looked out the window, slowly, he came to terms with his ever after: even if it wasn't what he wanted, or hoped, or dreamt of. Although he was seventeen, the boy had been in there for most of his teenage years: he knew he would never get out.
It was a prison cell. There is no simile, no metaphor, no anything behind that simple, lacklustre sentence. It was a fact: it would be a falsehood to say it was a technique. Outside his cell, through the miniscule window, was a stone wall with barbed wire designed to keep him locked up. The walls hold no prayer, nor a spirit.
To look at the paint that had started to chip off as time passed, or gouged by other prisoners occasionally brought into the isolation room- anything to pass horrendous, blood-sucking time, slowly going mad, theorising absurd meanings from the wall's blank (maybe judgemental) stare back.
Isolation rooms were all the boy had known since the mere, ripe age of fourteen. At fourteen, it wasn't experiencing new experiences in the wonderful world that gave him a euphoric thrill. It was seeing that women's face freeze, eyes more wild than a deer caught in a trap.
She had nothing beautiful about her but the blood gushing from her neck, trickling like the last drops of milk from a carton, down her jumpsuit. It looked so succulent, so sweet: tasted like glorious honey from the perfect honeycomb. And so did his next victims, and the victim after that, and the victim after that.
It was a prison cell.