By Johnny Utah
I was in jail.
My guess it was between 3 and 4 in the morning. There is a courthouse nearby with an old-fashioned clock that sounded the hour, but I didn’t I remember hearing the bell.
I had finished pissing as quietly as I could in our cell’s piss bucket. I adjusted my orange boxers and snapped up the bottom snaps of my orange jumpsuit. I gingerly shuffled to my bunk. All prisoners wore leg irons, even at night and they could make a racket. I didn’t want to wake my cellmate. We had been moved around the three available cells during our stay, so we had different cellmates, or were alone in solitary. Tonight, my cellmate was Ryan. Ryan is a well-built North Carolina guy a bit over six feet tall. He had half of a thin gray blanket over him from the waist up. It was the start of a hot July, but our cell was exposed to the full blast of the cellblock air conditioner. We both slept in our orange jumpsuits.