W i s p

from the March 2018 Wisp

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        by Anthony Raby          

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          I wandered the summer festival, contest to finally be free of the prison walls. I was free of the monochrome concrete, the dust and feet smell, the constant heightened awareness. I could go where I wanted, and I reveled in the near-sensory overload of it all. I was surrounded by loud voices, free from the usual tones of hostility and bitterness, and laughter. Real laughter, mingled with the pure joy of children’s laughter and carnival music. And the smells! Hot funnel cake, deep-fried everything, and pizza. My stomach growled. I homed in on the pizza.

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          I came up to a pizza booth, which was running some sort of eating contest. I watched a large Hawaiian man try to eat more pizza than one of the booth’s employees.

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          “Come on! You got this!” I yelled out.

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          Unfortunately, he didn’t win. As he walked away from the booth, nursing a sore stomach, another guy stepped up next to me. I looked over to find my friend, Lucas, next to me. We knew each other from our time together locked up in the United States Disciplinary Barracks.

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          “What’s up, man?” I asked.

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          “I’m gonna try this thing out,” he said, gesturing to the pizza-eating contest.

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          “Well, go for it then. I’ve seen you put away plenty of pizza during the special meals at the DB,” I said.

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          He nodded and walked up to the booth. A woman screamed from the Whirly-Gig ride behind me. He spent a few minutes talking to the man at the counter. I moved around, so a gaggle of teenagers could pass by me. Lucas and the guy at the counter moved to the contest table. In a voice like an old-school carnival barker, the pizza guy shouted.

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          “Ladies and gentlemen, we have another challenger. Please welcome Lucas to the challenge table! And remember, it’s two slices for $2.50! Get it while it’s hot!”

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          People gathered around to watch the spectacle. More of them bought pizza and watched the contest. At the sound of a bell, Lucas started putting the pizza away. I couldn’t help but laugh. Other jokes and cheered him on, growing louder than the general carnival noises around. Everyone seemed to be having a good time with this. It resembled a mob of people rioting, but there was no hostility or anger here. I was glad to be in the midst of the craziness.

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          Suddenly, I spotted my 12-year-old daughter across the crowd. I froze and my brain flashed back to the last time I saw her, six and a half years ago. I remembered her five-year-old self tackling me when I came home from work, yelling “Daddy!” I thought about the sound of her laughter as she chased bubbles on a warm summer day. I fought back tears at the quiet moments of reading Winnie-the-Pooh stories to her before bedtime. I missed her infectious happiness. I had to talk to her. I made my way around the crowd to her side. She wore a simple blue-and-white dotted sun dress, and sat on a small bleachers, watching the festivities. I leaned against the edge of the bleachers next to her.

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          “Hey, kiddo. How’re you doing?” I asked.

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          “What are you doing here, Dad?” she asked.

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          “You know. Enjoying the sunshine and happiness. I’m happy I got the chance to see you,” I said.

Her expression changed. I could see something was bothering her.

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          “Is everything all right? What’s wrong?” I asked.

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          “Nothing,” she said.

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          “Well, if it’s something I can help with, let me know. I haven’t seen you in a long time,” I said.

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          I affectionately knuckled her shoulder, as I often do with people. Her expression changed from discomfort to pure disgust.

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          “What did I do?” I asked, shocked by the change.

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          “Nothing, Dad. I’ve got to go.”

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          She held up her hand for a fist bump, which I obliged, but her hand barely touched me. She got up and stormed off. I watched her go and realized the reason for the disgust. It was me. It was why I hadn’t seen her in all these years. The reason I spent six years in prison. I watched her go and felt myself flood with a variety of emotions. Anger at my ex-wife for corrupting my daughter against me. Overwhelming grief and heartache for failing as a father. The blackest self-loathing for the pain I caused. I watched her sit down next to her mother. The color seemed to drain out of everything.

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          My ex-wife looked back at me with a look of disgust as well. I decided it was time to go. I walked away from the contest area. I couldn’t stand the noise and the happiness. I wanted to be alone. I couldn’t cry for all I was worth right here. I followed a fence separating a mud ride from the rest of the fairgrounds. The smell of fresh wet mud overwhelmed all the other smells. In the middle of my mental self-abuse, I became aware of someone running on the sidewalk behind me. I turned to find my ex-wife running to catch me. I stopped and leaned against the fence, facing the ride. I couldn’t face her.

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          “What?” I asked.

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          “You need to be careful about the looks you give me,” she said.

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          “Why? You gonna sue me in court for looking at you funny? I’ve got nothing else. You took it all,” I said.

I couldn’t hide the defeat in my voice.

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          “I watched her walk away from you,” she said.

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          “Yeah? That’s great. All I saw was a little you, full of hate and bitterness. There’s nothing left of me in her!” I shouted. “I guess this is what you wanted, though. Isn’t it? What’s worse, I can see you side of things too. What you would have gone through if I had taken her from you. I haven’t seen her since she was six!”

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          There was no hiding or controlling my anger and tears at this point. The anger at her and myself. The tears of my grief.

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          “She’s twelve,” my ex-wife said quietly.

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          “I know!” I shouted back.

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          Here, my voice fell apart, and I just rested my head against my hands on the fence, arms spread on either side, openly weeping.

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          “I’m so sorry,” I could barely get out above a whisper.

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          Past my own sobs, I could still hear the laughter of the people on the mud slides, the carnival music from the Ferris wheel. The sound of everyone else’s joy. It all sounded wrong. I was in the wrong place. I should have never come here. I never belonged here.

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          My ex-wife leaned close to me against the fencing. She rested her right arm along my left arm. She was so close, I could feel her breathing. I realized she was crying too.

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          I looked over and saw her face in profile. Her eyes were shut, tears streaming from them. She mouthed what could have been a prayer.

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          I was stunned. Here was the woman I married, had a child with. The woman who cheated on me with several men and wanted a divorce while I deployed to Iraq. The woman who sabotaged my every attempt at fixing our marriage. The woman who did everything to drive me away. She was also the woman I still desperately loved. The woman who can send my heart soaring with a smile. A woman with attitude and sometimes overwhelming amounts of kindness. My better half. Here, she stood with me in the midst of our grief, crying with me. I couldn’t say another word. Everything around me faded to black.

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          My eyes opened on the white concrete brick wall next to my bed. My small, eight-inch fan ran, moving the cold air around my room. I usually ran it to create white noise as I fell asleep. But in this moment, I couldn’t move. From the dream, I could still feel my ex-wife there next to me, still feel her on my arm and body.

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          I didn’t dare move for fear of losing that feeling. I hadn’t been that close with someone in the entire six and a half years of my incarceration. Even with all the problems my ex-wife and I had, I would have given anything for her to actually be there in that moment, just that close. I wanted this moment to be real.

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          Eventually, I had to move. As soon as I did, the feeling melted away like the delusion it was. My heart broke from the unreal contact, and my eyes leaked as I drifted back to sleep.

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          Dreams like this are pretty common for me. I keep a journal, and often, I record these dreams in all the detail I can remember in the morning. I’ve always had these vivid, life-like dreams as far back as I can remember, and sometimes, they are upsetting. Other times, I wake up from them, just insanely happy. The happy ones are the vivid dreams where I feel like I’ve actually spoken to my loved ones from across time and space. I can’t explain that feeling, just acknowledge that it exists.

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          In prison, where everything is the same few colors and the routines make each day the same, dreams like these become your life experience. What’s ultimately heartbreaking about this is that they’re not real. In reality, I doubt if my ex-wife or daughter will ever speak to me again, but these dreams help me push on. They help me maintain the hope required to keep pushing, keep improving myself, and just to keep moving forward. Sometimes, it feels like these dreams are all I have left.

 

          Anthony Raby writes from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

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