Day 1
There is no stain remover in the world that will get human brain matter out of a poly-cotton blend.
It looks just like they portray it in slasher flicks and gore fests, like some weird lumpy gray sausage straining to get out of its dull casing. There’s blood too. A contrast so stark it seems like someone took a red Sharpie to an old noir movie. Everything fades to the background and all you can see is the red. It sears into your line of sight brighter than the sun so when you close your eyes, it’s still there—burning hot.
I didn’t think about the red and the gray—the blood and the brains—until hours after the first time I saw them spread out before me. Not until I was at home and my uniform pants were splayed out across the washer and I looked at my pretreaters and stain removers, then back at the strange slashes of rusted red.
When it happened, there was no time for reflection, for horror or shock. Only action. Only what my training had prepared me for.
A man on his back in the yard.
Even without the crimson spray on the concrete, I knew he was dead. Prison is the lowest common denominator of civilization, where primal instincts and base needs rule. It’s a place where showing soft underbelly to the other predators is a sign of weakness. For a man to be on his back out on the yard where everyone could see him, his belly exposed, he had to be dead.
Especially with a bloody sock on the ground next to him. Nothing says “pay me” to the rest of your customers like a lock in a sock to the back of the head of someone who didn’t pay. I broke into a run before the alarm came over the radio. First responders erupted from the cell houses and other posts they were working, filling the yard like so many soldier ants ready for duty.
I wasn’t the first one on the scene, but it was me on my knees in the gore assisting the officer who began CPR. Pieces of the inmate’s skull were scattered on the ground like broken bits of china, and his head looked like a rotten watermelon. Rescue breaths, CPR, and all the emergency care in the world couldn’t help him.
The memory is stark and faded at the same time, parts of it as if they happened yesterday and other parts like they never happened at all. I know EMS was called, I know I filled out stacks of paperwork, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember talking to anyone, or doing anything that day. All I remember is the hard concrete under my knees and the blood on my hands, beneath my fingernails. The gray bits on my pants of what used to be a person.
Everything about him that made his place in the world was in that fleshy mess. The bad. His crime, the pain he inflicted on others, his motivations to do violence. The good. The people he loved. His hopes, his dreams. His memories. Everything that made him what he was right there under the afternoon sun spread out for any who cared to look.
I remember wiping my hands on my pants, the red and gray smearing up my thighs when I stood. Then I was at home, doing my laundry and wondering how the hell I was supposed to get a stain like that out of my uniform and if he’d been positive for HIV or HEP-C. There was a good chance of both—he’d been a punk. The tattoo on his neck marked him as Blood property, a commodity to be bought and sold, or rented out as the gang deemed fit. Add to that the infected injection site on his arm where he’d been shooting up, and he was two for two. Unprotected sex and needle sharing.
Even that realization was distant and unreal at the time. The only thing that was real was that I had been wrist deep in meat that used to be a man.
Shout got the blood out, but the gray remained.
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