Within the Prison Gates

He couldn't remember how long he had been there. How many full moons had passed, how many prayers he had quietly whispered to the moon goddess, how many monsoons had flooded the prison gates. It had been years now, but he could remember the details of the first day so clearly, as though it were yesterday. The fear lingered perpetually in his memories and haunted him in his nightmares. Life was fragile that first day, as he watched some of his closest friends die with a single shot from the M1 Carbine, a bullet weighing a little over seven grams.

Somewhere in the blackness, a cicada chirped mockingly in the hot night air, free. He closed his eyes. He felt the worms slithering around his bright red pus-filled ankles, rotten from the heavy ironclad chains that held them in place. The blood had dried and crusted over the wound, but the maggots fed on the flow underneath the scabs. Every shift of his legs opened up the flesh, towards which more maggots and insects crawled.

They didn't hurt him. What did they know of compassion and sympathy? They had been there for years, immutable companions coming for a good meal, and sometimes serving as meals during his toughest nights when the darkness encroached threateningly, and when sweat and death slithered down his forehead in bouts of famine and fever.

He opened his eyes, startled by a noise in the distance. A cry of anguish, long and painful, filled the valley hauntingly. It was a cry he was familiar with, guttural, almost animal-like, as he watched each of his friends deliver it during their last seconds of life. Now, there was only silence. He craned his neck and looked hard into the darkness to see if the guards were coming for him too. He wanted to look his murderers in the eye and let them know that they failed in taking away his dignity. He looked hard into the darkness, but saw nothing and heard nothing.

He closed his eyes again. That night was no different from any other night. And yet, from the depths of his soul, something shook violently. It started slowly. From the fungus that had infected all ten of his toenails, turning them a deep purplish black, from the wounded ankles filled with maggots and dried crusted blood, from the numbness in his legs and butt, frozen forever in their position, from his once-powerful arms, now beaten, bruised and cut from the daily whippings, his back burned by the sun's rays, his ribs threatening to tear through the skin entirely as famine took its toll. From the bottom of his lungs, something hurt really badly. It shook him, and he felt goosebumps all over his body. Finally, it traveled all the way to his worn face, filled with a forgotten pride and eyes that were once kind. Yes, the feeling traveled all the way to his eyes, and he felt something warm flow down the side of his face. Something that reminded him of home. Something that he had lost. It was a soft flow, like the ripples of the Mekong Delta on a hot summer day. Then, it became a torrential rain, mixed with the thunder of a voice he thought he had lost.

His body shook violently, and he heard a strange sound echoing through the jungle that night. For the first time in years, Ty Tran sat there in the black heat, body shaking, pools of water gathering at the tip of his chin, lonely.

And he cried and cried.