“Tempered Steel Heart”

A Short Story by Keith C. Milne

Rated R: Violence, Language, Sex, Drugs

PART 1

Frank stepped out into the night feeling angry and annoyed again. These feelings came a lot more often now, and sometimes they almost consumed him, like self-immolation, only with negative energy instead of fire. He took a huge inhale of the cool night air, then let it out slowly. He took another one for good measure, then began telling himself to take it easy and just deal with the fact that the world was full of idiots.

Frank’s therapist told him he needed to do this whenever he felt intense anger to help him calm down enough to avoid another “incident.” The thing is, ever since basic Marine Corp. training, followed by two tours in Afghanistan, then a bullet by the enemy that left Frank with a slight limp, Frank couldn’t stand being around idiots, especially stupid slobs with the IQ of peanut brittle who think they know everything already.

Being shot somehow made the issue of idiots extra prickly for Frank. The idiots were usually in their twenties, or even worse, in their forties but still acting like they’re in their twenties! Most of the time the shitheads just want to see how drunk, or stoned, or fucked up on something(s) they can get, thinking that the louder they talk, the cooler they are! To Frank, they are simply a waste of human flesh, with no discipline, goals, skills, or future.

The party was for Frank’s nephew, Stanley, who just turned twenty. He was already on anti-depressants, a Staten drug for cholesterol control, and easily weighed twice as much as Frank. He also seemed to think that he could just sit around and play video games and “fuck them hoes,” for the rest of his life while simultaneously never aging. It was quite obvious to Frank that, at the current pace of partying and ignoring all the health warnings about the consequences of doing the right thing for his health, that he would be lucky to make it to forty.

The party was slob central, and Stanley knew every fucking slob within a 20 mile radius, and they all decided they couldn’t miss this one. They piled up in that shit hole of a place and, right on queue, once the substances began hitting their pea brains, the volume of the party started going up exponentially, and the fighting was already getting under way.

Slovenliness drove Frank insane. He couldn’t stand the way people would put off shaving, or never shave at all. It annoyed him to no end the way people wore the most outlandish outfits, some all baggy and falling off of their behinds, or clothes so tight they showed every little nook and cranny of someones body, while they expect everyone to act like they aren’t noticing any of it.

White guys trying to talk like uneducated, punk, inner-city-gang members, complete with the lingo and look, and have no idea just how stupid and completely RIDICULOUS they looked and sounded!

Frank had never been sure of why anyone would choose the lazy, easy way by default, and then thought they could then somehow get anywhere in life. You can’t go around saying you’re together with nothing to show for being that way, then expect others to believe you and take you seriously.

Then there are the tattoo people.

Sometimes, Frank felt like confronting some of the gorgeous women who ruined their looks permanently with ugly pictures all over their arms and legs or more! He really wanted to understand how they thought the stupid, quaint little pictures of a heart, or a teddy bear, or something formidable, like a scorpion picture, made them look better than the way they look without the pictures.

The permanence of the tattooing bothered Frank more than anything. After all, how is an 80 year old woman going to feel still sporting a Tasmanian devil holding a pitchfork tattoo on the side of her neck or on one of her calf muscles? Frank thought, “Really not that big of a deal at first glance, but when you’re 80, if you make it that far, you’ll likely have a very different perspective and attitude about the tattoos still on you that you had done on a drunken night with friends. It’s another type of life sentence.”

Frank wished he could find more people like himself to befriend. He almost craved being able to know people with similar ideas about what constitutes right and wrong, who also valued etiquette; manners; showing respect to elders; taking a hat off once inside; talking in plain English without mumbling; and humbly and responsibly living and working while respecting, and showing kindness towards others as a living default behavior.

Those values are the ones that Frank thought he was defending over in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, just like his Vietnam brothers before him, Frank was just as disappointed in how little other people seemed to care about his, or the sacrifices of others in the military, taking it all largely for granted, or not giving it any thought at all.

Unfortunately, the search for like minded people to befriend continued, but as time marched on, Frank eventually gave up on actually finding anyone to be friends with. It saddened him even more to realize for the first time, and at a very deep level, that the world he used to know no longer existed.

His past, topped by the war in Afghanistan, had changed him in ways that no longer allowed him to feel genuine joy or happiness. He could hear a joke and laugh, but it was more autonomic, not genuine, and he no longer got really excited about anything, including holidays, special occasions, or parties.

To Frank, the world simply no longer felt like a very fun of a place to be anymore. Sure, he was glad to still be alive, at least that’s what he kept telling himself, but his soul-less heart seemed flat and unresponsive to almost everything now, creating an unwelcome burden that Frank had to live with every single day.

Frank wasn’t simply depressed, he was SCARRED FOR LIFE. He didn’t trust anyone and hadn’t since high school. Now he was just a man with a lot of pain who wasn’t always certain he still wanted to live, who had become an expert interrogator while in Afghanistan, and was now on his way to takeover as the new warden of the Granite Rock State Prison just southwest of Rockland, ME.

Frank snapped out of his thoughts when the party inside seemed to grow louder. Stanley seemed really happy that he’d made a showing, and Frank felt good about that. That’s what really mattered, but it frustrated him to no end that Stanley seemed deaf to everything Frank said to him. Frank wanted to influence Stanley in the best way, but it was pretty obvious that he was not going to be receptive to any of what Frank wanted to share with him. Stanley was well entrenched in the twenty-something know-it-all phase. The front door slammed open and one of Stanley’s so-called friends fell onto the pavement in front of the door and started bleeding pretty bad while laughing his ass off.

That was all Frank needed. He’d already had enough. Before anything else could happen, Frank crossed the driveway, and half-jogged to his Hyundai Ionic. He jumped in and quickly, and quietly zipped away. As Frank drove into the night with determination but no real direction, the song by the Beatles, “Twist and Shout” began playing. Listening to it, Frank’s thoughts drifted back to a time long ago when he still felt special and admired by others.

On his own, at around age 4, it did not go unnoticed that Frank began being oddly neat, putting things into straight lines of ascending or descending order. Taking clocks apart and putting them back together again in order to understand how they worked, or at least why the hands moved, and why the clocks functioned in the ways that they did.

By age 6, Frank had become very vocal with all the knowledge he had acquired just by being curious, asking questions, and finding the answers he needed at the library when he couldn’t get them at home. He liked to tell people he had just met, or even complete strangers while in the grocery store checkout how leaving things on stairs made tripping more likely, that looking directly at the sun even with sunglasses would burn out a person’s corneas, and that the Earth was 93 million miles away from the sun. He liked knowing new things, and was especially curious about how and why things worked the way they did, as well as how redesigning or modifying things could improve them.

One Saturday afternoon, an insurance salesman stopped by for his appointment with Frank’s father, Mel. When the doorbell rang, Frank ran to open the door. After the man identified himself, and while still standing in the doorway, the salesman could see the chess board that Mel always kept set up and ready to go in case someone wanted to play a game. The man looked at Frank and asked him if he played. Frank smiled and nodded no. After coming inside, the man offered to teach Frank how to play, reassuring Frank that it really wasn’t that hard to learn. Frank was ready and, being the curious boy that he was, decided it would be amazing to learn how to play chess, then he could surprise his Father when he came home. Frank agreed to let the man teach him chess.

Two hours later, the man was shaking his head as he walked to the front door, loudly exclaiming that it was the darnedest thing he had ever seen. He was shocked that Frank learned how to play the game in roughly 15 minutes, and learned it well enough to beat him two out of three games, especially when he had been playing chess semi-regularly for the last 20 years!

When Mel had come home and saw what was going on, he was even more surprised! He had mistakenly assumed that Frank was too young to be able to comprehend the complex rules and move criteria inherent in chess, so he hadn’t taught Frank the game yet. He was VERY impressed. Strange, now that Frank thought about it, that was the ONLY TIME he remembered his father ever being openly impressed with anything Frank did.

Organization always came easy for Frank, it was so simple to him. Frank preferred everything to be organized, because it made everything easy to find. Zero clutter. For Frank, clutter anywhere was the equivalent of visual white noise. The more clutter, the louder the noise would be until Frank had to fix the clutter or remove himself from the area until the clutter could be taken care of. Like Superman in the presence of kryptonite, the longer Frank remained in the presence of clutter, the more confused, overwhelmed, and anxious he felt.

While Frank was still a kid in school, he had a hard time making any friends. He somehow intuitively knew he was smarter than most of the other kids. Even in preschool, he had already begun noticing differences in skill sets between himself and others. Despite his intelligence, it took him a long time to figure out why he was, or might be having such a hard time making friends.

When everyone else wanted to watch TV or play records or listen to the radio, Frank wanted to read. Frank wanted to study in order to get straight A’s in school, because he really liked doing extremely well. He remembered Mel always telling him that God gives different gifts to different people, and it was up to them to find their own gifts, and then use them to always do the very best possible.

For Frank, studying and learning was his way of having fun. When other kids just wanted to play outside and seemed okay to just get by, get mediocre grades, and accept simply doing the minimum or doing good enough to get by, Frank spent his time trying to learn everything he could in order to have an edge and excel in life.

Young Frank couldn’t find a single person who wanted to come over to study, or work with him to memorize the answers to test questions using flash cards.

Once the word got out that Frank didn’t want to play army, or wrestle, or play spin the bottle with the girls, or fist-fight with the boys, or go skinny dipping at the far end of the lake, no one wanted to be his friend.

The final straw for friendship and Frank came when the word got out that Frank couldn’t be counted on to participate in going with a group to the corner market to help distract the grocer so the other kids could fill their pockets with penny candy. It’s somewhat of a right of passage, and would’ve gone a long way towards Frank’s acceptance by others had he just gone along even once. Nope! Frank was just too good, too honest, too loving and sensitive, too kind, and too different to make any friends while a young boy.

Unfortunately, this carried over into his young adulthood, too. No dating or dancing or going to the movies with a girl and holding hands, or having any opposite sex stuff for Frank. By the time Frank was a teenager, his reputation for being an annoyingly perfect person prevented him from having any normal social interactions whatsoever.

Frank tried really hard at different times to fit in with various crowds and groups while in school. He never felt comfortable with any of them. He couldn’t believe how many people there were in the world who just went along, but never stood up, or stood out for any reason whatsoever. No making or taking a stand, just going along with what, or who seemed popular at the time. Most people, just go along and float along in order to get by and to be left alone and not get into trouble. They largely let others think for them or they merely adopt the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs they would hear from others without questioning any of them.

To make socializing matters even harder, Frank couldn’t tolerate loud noises and crowds. He couldn’t understand how so many people seemed to be immune to the effects of both. To Frank’s ears, the noise from vehicles racing by, or of people in a crowded restaurant all talking at the same time, and trying to talk over one another is an excruciatingly painful experience.

Sometimes, Frank feels that his isolation is a good thing. Self-imposed isolation has its benefits too. It allows him time to recharge his batteries and quiet the harmonics of his world. Frank often grows tired of having to explain himself to others, or pretend to like things that he doesn’t like to appease others and be socially accepted. He hates seeing the look on other people’s faces when he tells them he doesn’t like concerts, or going to the race track, or to the big State Fair in the Fall. “Why the heck do people think it’s fun to lose their hearing? I don’t get it,” Frank thought.

Frank continued driving north and watched the last orange-red sliver of the setting sun drop below the western horizon. Traffic was almost non-existent and he was starting to feel better, despite the rerun playing in his head.

There was nothing worth listening to right now on all the streaming music venues, so he tapped the music off on the in-dash display screen and let the silence of the air flowing past his vehicle lull him back into the theater in his head continuing the movie of his past.

Frank replayed key moments in his childhood sometimes so often, it became a temporary nightmare. He sometimes wouldn’t be able to “reset” without going to see his therapist for help seeing clearly again.

He rarely had found respite from one mental horror or another. Remembering some of the things in his past made it feel as though many of Frank’s bad dreams had manifested into reality. He could containerize and internalize his memories for awhile in order to be productive, but they continually worked to seep through the barriers Frank had put up in his mind, and would ultimately form into another movie.

Sometimes, Frank wondered if he thought about his childhood enough, maybe he would just be able to see all of his life in a different way, noticing the problem areas, then make some simple adjustments to his personality or other variables that would benefit the transition and, presto, he would be accepted, and liked, and have friends like everyone else, and just forget all the crap that weighed heavily on his heart constantly.

Frank’s family moved into a new neighborhood when he started the sixth grade, and that’s when Frank’s beatings began.

A group of three boys who were always together like three-way Siamese twins joined at the hip decided to make him their target. They were a strange bunch who would finish sentences for each other like an alien triad, and could seemingly read each others minds. They stopped him in the hallway one day and demanded two dollars.

Frank’s family was poor, and rarely had the money to even afford to let Frank eat a hot lunch in the cafeteria. Today was one of those days. Frank had brought his lunch from home and had zero money in his pocket. He told them he didn’t have any money, and that’s when Frank received his first black eye.

Once the beatings and taunting started, they became a regular part of life for Frank. The boys would trip him for no good reason. They would punch him in the stomach for no reason. They put fish guts in his locker. They flattened the tires on his bike. They sometimes took turns smacking him in the face for fun, slapping him over and over again, threatening him even more harm if he tried to run, calling him a little bitch while they did it until they got tired of it, or grew bored and decided to stop.

One time, Frank was in the bathroom in one of the stalls during class. He used to hold his number 2 so that he could be excused to go during class and that way be guaranteed to have some privacy.

This time, Frank had just finished going, and flushed. Just as he stood up and started getting his clothes back together, the main bathroom door banged open. Through the crack in the stall, Frank could see that it was Zach! Zachary Holmstead, the biggest of the three bullies that always picked on him. Frank had heard that he was big like that because he was held back in school two years in a row for not doing well academically.

Zach had come into the boys bathroom alone. Frank stood still in the stall, trying not to make a sound, but somehow Zach knew he was there and, just as loudly as he had come into the bathroom, he suddenly kicked the stall door hard. The door flew open hitting Frank’s leg. Frank stood there mortified! He could feel the fear rising up in him so fast he thought it would drown him. His pants were still lassoed around his ankles, and his face was so hot and red he thought it was going to melt off.

Before Frank could do anything, Zach grabbed him while loudly laughing and yanked him around to face the wall away from him. He quickly bent Frank over banging his head hard against the tiled wall while telling Frank he’d better not move or make a sound. Frank heard Zach spit, and then tried with all his might not to scream as Zach began raping him.

Frank wriggled and tried to get free as hard as he could, but Zach had one hand gripping the back of Frank’s head keeping it up against the hard tile wall, and Frank’s other arm twisted back behind him. Frank kept his eye’s squeezed tightly shut the entire time. He tried hard not to scream, each time Zach thought Frank might scream, he slammed his head hard against the wall again, and Frank’s ears were now ringing loudly and he felt dizzy.

The rape was over in four hard, quick, extremely painful thrusts, then Frank heard Zach moan and felt a wet warmth spreading inside. Next, he felt a sudden absence, for a second a slightly tighter grip on his arm, then another slam of his head into the wall.
Frank was on the edge of passing out, but heard Zach say, “you say a thing to anyone and I will end you,” then left just as fast as he had arrived.

Unbeknownst to him at the time, in addition to enduring beatings, name calling, slapping, and being robbed, Frank was also going to have to endure being raped and sodomized regularly from now on.

Frank learned to to escape some of these punishments by rescheduling some of his classes so that Zach would be on the other side of campus during part of the school day. He used alternate routes as much as possible both coming and going from school, sometimes walking a couple of miles out of his way just to avoid being seen by Zach and his two alien leaches.

Unfortunately, he only got part time respite from the violence, and sometimes was beaten worse because it had been awhile since the group had been able to have their way with him.

Frank was grateful that, thus far, the rapes had only come from Zach, not the other two freaks. Frank never knew their true names, and it was just as well. Whenever he pictured them, different names would pop into his head. Most of the time he just called them leaches, but freaks, aliens, and zombies were also used regularly to describe or refer to Zach’s sidekicks.

Twice, Zach waited under the bridge that went over a small stream near Frank’s neighborhood, watching and secretly laying in wait for Frank to stroll by.

The first time, when Zach saw Frank coming, he’d hid and waited until the last second, then suddenly appeared and scared the hell out of Frank. While Frank was busy freaking out, Zach grabbed him and looked at him with an evil, menacing darkness that made Frank feel like he was looking into the eyes of a dead person or a shark, and then raped him right there under the bridge.

The second time, Zach wrestled Frank to the ground and wanted Frank to open his mouth while on his knees facing him, but when Frank realized what Zach wanted him to do, he clamped his mouth shut and kept turning his head from side to side, even while Zach was smacking him, trying to get him to comply. After awhile, Zach grew tired of Frank’s resistance and turned him around and raped him like the first time in the bathroom.

Zach was ruthless with Frank, and with each rape, Frank’s inner rage over being violated grew like a wildfire getting so hot is begins creating it’s own weather. The intensity and frequency of these experiences added to Frank’s growing feeling of terror and doom.

Frank began making lots of excuses to his parents about his numerous injuries, but was glad to be able to stay home sick as much as possible. Mel eventually came to know some of the truth about the beatings, but never anything about the regular rapes that Frank had to endure. He thought it was just boy fighting stuff that they would eventually work out on their own.

Mel grew tired of seeing his son humiliated and injured all the time. He tried to help and asked Frank what was going on, but Frank wouldn’t say anything to his Father about what was really happening. He tried to imagine telling his father the whole truth, even fantasized about it fondly, then found himself laughing like an insane person after playing a trial run of it in his head.

‘Yeah, uh Zach at school has been beating me up, taking my lunch money, tearing my clothes, punching me in the stomach, slapping me, humiliating me in front of people by calling me names and taunting me, and, oh, did I mention that he’s been raping me regularly for the past couple of months?’

Now a senior, Frank counted the days until graduation. He knew that once he left high school he would likely not ever have to contend with Zach and his two cronies ever again. Sure, there maybe more people to contend with in the future, but after two broken noses, three broken ribs, a dislocated knee, and so many bruises and contusions on his torso over the years that he had lost count, and being raped a dozen times, Frank vowed that he had suffered too much and would no longer let anyone hurt him ever again. At first he wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to accomplish this, but when Frank McCall set his mind to something, he had a reputation for delivering. Everyone who knew him would agree.

PART 2

“Let’s get a move on! Come on, move it, man!” the guard belted out in Zach’s face as soon as he got off the van. “We’ve got a lot to get through today! The more you pay attention and do what’s expected of you, the better off we’re all going to be! Understand!?”

Zach rolled his eyes and kept half-hopping along towards the entrance to the side processing door near the main entrance to Granite Rock State Prison. Zach heard this prison was better than most. Better food, better activities, better cells. Once he processed in they took him to his cell.

It was a 10’L x 6’W x 10’H rectangular cube defined by concrete and steel. It reminded Zach of his grandmother’s walk-in closet at her house in New Orleans. Beyond the space itself, it only had a couple of essential basics: an open faced stainless steel toilet bolted and welded to the wall, a rack mounted on the opposite wall catty corner from the toilet, also bolted and welded to the wall, with only a meager, thin, minimal mattress covering the top of the always cold, steel platform. Zach stepped inside his cell and turned around just in time to see the hydraulically powered door finish closing in an eerily quiet way.

The prison was built out onto a finger or peninsula that jutted out into the Gulf of Maine running west to east. Under the prison, there was nothing but granite bedrock. In front of it, and on two other sides there were only sheer cliffs straight down to the jutting rocks below, with icy surf from the Gulf of Maine trying to pound them into sand.

Only the entry side from the mainland road to the prison offered any hope for anyone thinking of escaping, but the multiple guard towers on top of the 50 foot tall wall, with a hydraulically controlled double gate, sporting doors that are each 25 feet tall and 15 feet wide with titanium beams every 4 feet apart from top to bottom, adding enough strength to them that they are able to withstand being rammed by a tank.

Zach knew he needed to be a little more crafty here at Granite Rock. This place seemed more high-tech, and he already knew he was going to have a much harder time finding people to pay off and use in order to satisfy his sexual appetite, along with the various drug supplies and extra cigarettes he was used to being flush with. This was going to be a bit more expensive for sure.

Over at Knox County, where Zach has spent the first three years of his 20 year sentence for manslaughter, he’d gotten away with a lot. Little by little, he had asserted himself in just the right ways to just the right people at just the right time so that his reputation grew as someone to be very afraid of. One time, this really big black dude went up to Zach in the exercise yard and told him he wanted Zach to give him his dessert every night at dinner until further notice. Before Zach could say a word, the man put his left hand on Zach’s shoulder, leaned in, and said,

“If you always do what I say, then you’ll have it much easier. If you buck me, I will tear your dick off and feed it to you before snapping your neck. In the meantime, if I say I want your dessert, or you for dessert, you will comply or else you will regret the day you were born, understood?!”

Zach froze for a moment. He heard the big man’s voice go up an octave and ask him again, “Understood!?” while squeezing Zach’s shoulder extra hard for emphasis.

In a flash, Zach grabbed the wrist of the hand on his shoulder with a steely grip, then as fast as lightening spun completely around never letting go of the man’s wrist. Zach felt the mans arm reach maximum resistance, and right at that point, he added extra speed to the twist while maintaining his steely grip, and cranked hard, counter-clockwise until he felt the man’s wrist break, making a definitive cracking sound that could be heard halfway across the yard.

The man screamed loudly and yanked his arm back with all his might, throwing him off balance. Zach used that momentum and added a hard punch to him, then watched the man go down face first on the pavement. Once the big man was down, Zach began kicking him in the face until the guards came and took him to his cell where he would end up stuck for the next thirty days. After that incident, no one, including Bernie the big black dude, ever messed with Zach again.

Zach couldn’t believe how quiet Granite Rock State Prison was compared to County. It was astounding how here he could hear his own heartbeat, and even the gastric noises coming from his own body. There was a lot of acoustic tiles, and the small, solitary cells prevented inmates from talking to one another except for the time they have in the common exercise yard, so noise here was minimal.

Zach had been convicted of manslaughter for the death of a twenty-two year old homosexual prostitute that Zach had brutally beaten, sexually assaulted, and sodomized. Zach had claimed he had “accidentally” killed the man by strangling him during sex, but that he hadn’t intended to kill him.

The DNA from Zach was found on the victim, and it took the jury less than one hour to find him guilty of manslaughter. During sentencing, the judge looked at Zach’s exhaustive and violent juvenile record of fighting, theft, arson, and sexual assault on numerous other boys, and sentenced him to twenty years in State Prison.

Zach was only 33 when he went to Know County. Now he was 36 and at the big house. If he stayed out of anymore trouble he could be out by age 48 with good behavior.

While Zach had been waiting for a permanent spot to open up at either Granite Rock or the Maine State Prison near Bath, there were 4 incidents of sexual assault that involved rape, and beatings, and threats of further violence or death for non-compliance or fighting the rape. No one that knew the culprit would ever divulge his identity, mainly because that type of information was a form of credit that could be used to negotiate all kinds of favors and interesting illegal supplies.

The first three of the four victims at County had all described a similar tale: they had decided to take a shower after dinner when everyone was allowed some free time, but near the end of free time so that they had maximum privacy in that part of the bathroom. All three were attacked and raped by someone who threw a towel over their head, then slammed their heads into the wall attempting to knock them out or disorient them doing this when the victims had their eyes closed while shampooing. The fourth victim died during his attack.

When the warden at County realized that the incidents began when Zach showed up, and then looked at Zach’s record, he decided to remove Zach without any proof, just to see if these incidents would stop.

To get away with his crimes, Zach had used an insider, the intake officer’s assistant, a “trusted” inmate who Zach would give a carton of cigarettes to every month for letting Zach know about new prisoners coming in who met Zach’s criteria.

Zach preferred light colored hair, blue or blue-green eyes, younger than 35, and thin or somewhat frail, and anyone who appeared to be scared to death, black, white, or hispanic. NO ASIANS! Zach especially despised them.

Once Zach had a “target,” he would quietly watch them for a few days and get used to the patterns they developed. Newbies, the most scared of all the inmates, always tended to avoid the shower area when it was full. Zach knew that they had it wrong: the best time to use the shower is when everyone is there competing for a nozzle. The most dangerous time was when everyone else is scarce, like outside in the exercise yard.

Once the rapes began, the act itself would feed on Zach’s inner anger, and rage, and channel his need to feel powerful over another human being, while inflicting pain on them, and using his power to humiliate them, and force them to take what he was giving while fucking his victims.

PART 3

Frank arrived two hours early to the prison. He had been awakened by an unexpected lightening storm and couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards, so he decided to just get ready and go in. Once in his office, he made a coffee, settled into his big leather chair to read the logs from the last guard shift, and go over today’s schedule.

Frank had changed quite a bit since he was a young man. He was still mentally as sharp as ever, but his life, so far, had left him not smiling. Frank never smiled—EVER. Instead, he wore a constant stone face that was more emotion-neutral, and the closest anyone would ever get to seeing him actually laugh, would only see what amounted to a nearly simultaneous combination of a grunt and grimace.

In uniform, he appeared to be someone to be reckoned with. He wore his vast achievements: his purple heart, his medal of honor, and his sharpshooter awards front and center, surrounded by numerous lessor medals, but medals earned the hard way nevertheless.

Frank was always ship-shape, shoes shined, uniform perfectly pressed, and face clean shaven. His desk and office reflected his personality: minimal furniture, a few awards and certificates on the wall, a picture of President Barack Obama shaking his hand after his Medal of Honor ceremony. Everything was in exactly the right place, and only essentials were kept close at hand.

After looking over the days activity calendar, aside from the morning briefing with all of the day shift staff and guards, there wasn’t a single thing scheduled for the rest of the day. Frank was glad because had something special in mind today, and a clear schedule would make the whole thing easier and far more enjoyable.

Inside the prison, many of the inmates were also awakened by the storm. Zach personally loved the energy he always felt during electrical storms. He didn’t respect or honor much, but he always respected what he knew was greater than himself.

At six a.m. sharp, the lights came on and the day in cell block B began just like any other day. First breakfast, complete with the usual negotiations and swaps of food between inmates. Next in line is the exercise yard for 2 hours, then therapy classes, followed by another hour in the yard, then lunch. Back to your cell for 2 hours, followed by the yard for another two hours, then dinner and free time. Rinse and repeat pretty much the same almost all the time.

Free time lasted 3 hours, then lights out. Free time was time to do anything you wanted: go visit other inmates, play cards or games, read, take care of some personal grooming or hygiene. It was up to the inmate what they did from evening to evening during free time.

Zach liked to shoot the shit with the two prisoners on either side of his cell for awhile while chain smoking cigarettes. Tonight, he needed to take a shower, and had previously been told that all inmates are monitored for hygiene, and that no inmate was allowed to go more than 48 hours without a shower. If an inmate didn’t comply, they would be forcibly escorted to the shower and scrubbed by guards. Of course no one wanted to be the one to suffer that fate! Most guys like taking a shower everyday, especially when they aren’t paying for all of the hot water and energy, so this rule had never needed to be enforced-yet.

Zach had grown up very poor and was often threatened with physical harm by his father if he was caught taking more than a shower every couple of days. He was used to going at least a couple, and sometimes even three or four days without showering.

After doing this for years, he had grown to like the complaints about his body odor. He’d wait for ‘The Look,’ while lingering around others, then laugh like crazy when people would realize it was him and mumble how disgusting he was for letting himself get that stinky. Unfortunately, this made it easy for Zach to forget about the showering rule and he had been warned a couple of times already.

This night, the prison guards gave Zach the benefit of the doubt by leaving him alone for the maximum amount of time they could for him to comply on his own. They knew Zach liked to let himself get super smelly just to piss others off, and were hoping that they would finally be able to escort him to the shower and have a scrubbing party.

Lights went out at 9:00 p.m., and all prisoners were to be in their cells and accounted for after lights out. After the lights went out, Zach heard the sound of a small group of men talking. The talking grew louder and now Zach could see flashlight beams on the walls that seemed to be coming towards his cell. Suddenly, a group of 5 men appeared in front of his cell. They were all wearing black hoods and black body suits.

“Zachary Holmstead, you are going to come with us to the shower room for violating house rule #4: no inmate shall go more than 48 hours without taking a shower.”

Zach’s eye’s grew wide, “Hey, come on now, there’s no need for this, I’ll just get my stuff and go and do that right now fellas.”

Before Zach could finish his sentence, two of the men stepped closer and each one grabbed one of Zach’s arm’s and wrestled him out into the cell block corridor, and whisked him along the hallway took Zach directly to the shower.

As Zach was dragged through the bathroom, through the sink and shaving area, followed the toilet area, he screamed, “Hey, you can’t do this! Does the Warden know about this!! I have rights!! Just because I’m a prisoner doesn’t give you the right to scrub me against my will. I have an attorney and he’s a good one and he’s going to sue you, this prison, and the State of Maine for all the money in the coffers because you can’t do this against my will.”

Once they finished dragging Zach all the way into the shower area, all the way in the back, Zach knew he was done.

As they rounded the corner dragging Zach, there were at least twenty others already in the shower area wearing black body suits and hoods. Some had weapons. Men holding pieces of pipe, one person was holding a plastic a toilet brush, and another a small, little league baseball bat.

“NO, NO, NO FUCKING WAY!!” Zach screamed at the top of his lungs as the men wrestled him over to the far wall at the furthest end of the back of the shower area, but no cared, and anyone who might care couldn’t hear a thing.

Zach saw his world go black. One of the men had placed a black hood over his head, with only a cut out for his mouth and nose, but not his eyes. Someone hit him hard in the head, then slammed his head against the wall. Two of the men kept a steely grip on him, each one holding one of Zach’s arm’s twisted behind his back to the point of breaking a wrist of dislocating a shoulder, while they all gang raped him.

Zach thought the assault would never end. He knew he had at least 3 broken ribs and could barely breathe without feeling a sharp, stabbing pain in his left side right below his heart. He knew he was bleeding rectally, and could taste the blood in his mouth and hear the grinding of his loose teeth while moving his tongue around.

Suddenly, the room grew extremely quiet. Just when Zach thought he was alone, he heard the sound of boots slowly and deliberately walking through towards him.

“All clear? Yeah, all yours now, sir!”

The sound of the footsteps grew louder and stopped just behind Zach, who was now slumped onto the floor, still facing the wall with his hood on, trying hard to breathe while trying not to whimper and cry.

“What do you want?!” he shouted to the stranger. There was no immediate answer.

After a couple of minutes, the stranger said, “Nothing I can ever get back from you”

There was something vaguely familiar with the stranger’s voice.

“Zachary Holmstead, you have finally met your fucking demise!”

Hearing this Zach shouted “You think?! Bring it bitch!”

Suddenly, Zach felt the pointy end of a steel toed boot tag the right side of his head knocking him to the ground. Then he felt himself being picked up, and a fist slammed into his face cracking the bridge of his nose in two places and sending blood gushing out that rapidly began dripping all over the floor and mixing in with shower water, forming a few tiny pink rivers that joined before flowing towards one of the nearby drains.

“Yeah, how does that feel you son-of-a-bitch?! Want some more? Frank said kicking Zach in the chest knocking him back against the wall and taking the wind out of him.

Zach squinted in the bright lights as his hood was ripped off of his head. He was so damaged, he knew he couldn’t get up. His hands were zip-tied together. His pants were bunched around his ankles, and he could feel himself bleeding from several locations. Parts of his head and face were so swollen he could barely see. He couldn’t breathe through his nose whatsoever, and every move he made informed him of new injuries.

Zach felt a hand grab his hair and twist his head around and found himself looking right into Frank McCall’s eyes!

“YOU! How the hell did you get here? What the fuck is all of this?!”

“You know what the hell this is, Zachary! Yeah, it’s me! ‘Little Frankie’ and I finally grew a pair, joined the Marines, learned hand-to-hand combat techniques, went to Afghanistan, interrogated shitheads just like you, and sometimes accidentally killed them.

Oh well, collateral damage and all. Yeah, Zachariah! The torturer of my youth! The asshole that kept me feeling scared for years! YEARS!! I finally grew up, and then I learned how to kick ass in the Marine Corp. But it wasn’t Afghanistan or being an interrogator that robbed me of my ability to feel, I have you to thank for that!

Thanks to you, I no longer feel ANYTHING, so trust me when I tell you that, whether or not you survive this meeting won’t affect me whatsoever either way. You ruined me! I was no longer innocent, but I was still smarter than most. I just sucked my anger in, and carried on the best that I could until I could figure out my next step, and I just kept doing that. Little by little I turned into a robot with a tempered steel heart.

Now, I’m the Warden of a State Prison that you are incarcerated in. I no longer believe it is worth while trying to ‘rehab’ wastes of human flesh like you! What a FUCKING WASTE OF EVERYONES TIME AND MONEY THAT IDEA IS! I CAN’T BELIEVE I THOUGHT THAT COULD HAPPEN. You can’t rehab evil.

So, this is what’s become of you, eh Zach? I knew that a two-bit punk like you would end up doing time for crime because that’s all you ever did was commit crimes. And, sexual crimes are the most heinous, and I know exactly all about that, and so do you. No one can prove what you’ve done Zach, but I need you to tell me right now why I should spare your pathetic life today?

I can fucking kill you Zach, right here, right now. Right now, I AM YOUR GOD! WHY SHOULD I FUCKING SPARE YOU ANYTHING TODAY ZACH? WHY SHOULD YOU NOT KNOW PAIN AND SUFFERING AND HORROR like you inflicted on me, and Steve, and Adam, and David, and only God knows who else over at Knox County or even before you ended up there?”

As swollen as Zach’s eye’s were, he could see that Frank was getting really wound up and that worried him.

Frank stopped shouting and stood still staring at Zach, remembering what happened in high school like a colorized 4K movie streaming in his mind. First Frank remembered Zach taking his money, then he recalled Zach raping him, taking both his dignity and his innocence.

Frank grabbed Zach, turned him around hard and as if in one singular motion, slammed his head into the bathroom wall hard one more time, “remember this Zach?!?.” Before he could answer anything, Zach lost consciousness.

Frank turned to one of the hooded guards as he walked away and back into the toilet area. “I don’t give a fuck what people do to that evil piece of shit, just make sure he lives through it. MAKE SURE, UNDERSTOOD?!”

“Understood sir!”

When Frank returned to his office, he ran to his private bathroom and repeatedly vomited. He felt as though he needed to purge the evil that tried to infiltrate him while he was dealing with Zach, and while recalling all of the horrible memories, violence, pain, and suffering associated with him. Frank’s body shuddered, and he vomited more as he recalled each incident with Zach all those years ago.

Frank stepped out of the shower, dried off, and quickly dressed in civilian clothes. He grabbed a coffee and walked over and sat down at his desk. He pulled his keyboard in close, tapped in his password and logged onto his computer. Frank hesitated momentarily, struggling to find the words, then typed:

I Francis McCall of Granite Rock State Prison, Maine, do hereby resign my commission as Warden, effective immediately. 

I very much appreciate having had the opportunity to be the Warden of this fine facility for the time I served.

I understand that this is rather abrupt, and with no warning. I will say, without subjecting you to any inappropriate personal details, that I have come to realize that my initial desire to be employed within the penal system was rooted in my own horrific personal past history which I had repressed.

I can no longer remain here in my role as Prison Warden and be effective as such, nor will I be able heal from my my own past while remaining in this environment daily.

Best Regards,

Francis McCall

Frank left his resignation letter on the desk, walked out, and never stepped foot in another prison again for the rest of his life.

3 years later Frank’s father Mel came excitedly rushing in from getting the morning paper. He was half running, shouting, “Eva, Eva, look!” When he found her, Mel pointed to the article. Eva took the paper and sat down on the sofa.

Around Town Announcements:

Frank McCall, son of Melvin and Eva McCall of Rockport, MA recently earned his MSW from the New England University School of Social Work. Mr. McCall recently opened a small practice in town at 342 Main Street, Rockport, MA. specializing in helping victims of violent sexual trauma. He is currently taking new patients.

Zachary Holmstead was beaten for awhile longer by the guards after Warden McCall left the room, and suffered further head injuries. While left alive as ordered, he was going to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, unable to speak without the assistance of computer technology. He died ten years later, while still serving time for his original manslaughter conviction.