By Joshua Ryan
So that’s the way it was, as — what do they say? — the days stretched into weeks and the weeks stretched into months. If this was a movie, there would be a calendar with the pages flipping past. No reason to stop at any of them. Every day was the same, except for Sundays.
They don’t make you work on Sunday. Somebody said “it’s because Old Man Williams needs a day off,” which made everybody laugh because nobody could figure out what he did on the other days of the week. Him and the jeans dudes. Who turned out to have names. “Ethan is the one that locks us up at night,” I was told, “and Chad is the one that lets us out in the morning.” There were a lot of jokes about whether Chad and Ethan were always packing guns because they never had anything else to shoot with. But everybody knew that they wouldn’t think twice about shooting one of us.
That first Sunday I just laid on my bunk, listening to my body trying to recover from every kind of pain, in every member except one, which I hadn’t used in so long that I couldn’t remember it. But the overwhelming pain was knowing that I was a workie. On the other Sundays I was given more education about what that meant.
