By Joshua Ryan

Back at the House, the atmosphere seemed to be changing.

Everybody noticed it  — things were different. Cicero was snapping at everyone, at least everyone whose existence he noticed. Sacky complained about “these constant ALTERATIONS in my menus” that were made by Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Thomasen. Marky complained about being rousted “in the middle of the night” — meaning his jerk-off time after dinner and Sacky’s kitchen wine — and having to drive Mr. H and Mr. T to the Parrot Lounge and wait in the car till they “came out with something or other,” a something that spent the night in their bed and was returned to obscurity the next morning, “after stinkin up my car.” Then it all stopped, as suddenly as it started. The Misters decided to try something else.

Late one afternoon, right before dinner, a new workie arrived in the back of a truck and was hauled out of its cage and led to the barracks. Its name was Jody, and it was a very cute young man, or had been before it got put in a workie suit. Clearly, it had done service in some other venue besides Hamilton Farms: there was fuzz on its head, and it still had eyebrows. But it had big brown eyes and a nice slender body. This was no field hand. Wherever it had been, it had been given easy treatment. To its body, anyway. The brain might be different. Its eyes were scared — very scared. Which is normal, when you’ve just been shipped somewhere in a cage. Cicero stood in the door of the barracks and told Nob to “take off its hair and move it up to the House. That’s where it’s gonna live.”

Continue reading The WORC Program – Part 16 →

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.

Continue reading The WORC Program – Part 10 →