By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 4: The First Time I Saw Paris

The bus seemed to be full; it must have made several other stops before getting to me.  Some of the passengers were dressed in solid orange, others in stripes.  A few were in normal clothes.  It was very quiet; the only sound was the rumble of the highway, the faint sigh of the A/C, and the rattling of shackles when somebody shifted his feet.  There was a guy in the seat next to me, a young guy with long blond hair—the kind of young guy that makes you feel old.  He was one of the prisoners in stripes, his yellow hair lying pitifully against the black-white bars on his jumpsuit.  From time to time he sniffled, and I knew he was crying.  I wanted to look out—to do something besides listen to my chains clattering every time I moved, but there were bars on the window and I couldn’t see much more than him, raising his hands to dab at his nose, and a blur of sky striped with steel on the other side of him.  The bus went fast.  Then we were off the freeway and driving through a town that had to be Paris.  Nothing else in the region had that beaten, rusted-out look.

The bus stopped for a train, and I saw the line of dead factories that followed the tracks.  After the last boxcar limped past we bumped across the rails and onto a wide street that should have been filled with cars and lined with businesses.  Should have, and wasn’t.  We were going slower, so I saw more, but all I could see was vacant lots, factories with rust creeping across their sides, and liquor stores with their windows blocked up.  Then, abruptly, the narrow lawns and the broken sidewalks and the parking spaces filled with derelict vehicles were replaced by a gray concrete wall rising next to the street, tall and long and getting longer as the bus slowed down.   And now it had stopped.

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