Free On the Yard by Malcolm Braly

continued to read constantly. There was nothing else to do.
    His new cell partner appeared to be asleep. He was fortunate to have drawn this apparently decent man. He wondered how Manning would fit into the prison zoo. Would he hop around and grunt and apologize continually because he wasn’t covered with fur, or would he adopt Juleson’s own strategy and hide out in a corner watching the animals from a distance and taking every precaution necessary to keep free of them in all essential ways?
    It was too early to expect to fall asleep, but he undressed and got under the covers. He stared up at the mottled ceiling and automatically the defenses he had raised against his memories moved in to protect him. He refused to remember even after three and a half years, but his sense of loss still retained its power to punish him. In his unguarded moments he missed small things—the sound of high heels on a pavement, sweet smells, and the pleasure he had found riding home on the bus after a day’s work. He missed dogs and children.
    He drifted into one of his favorite fantasies in which he had the power of teleportation and could move anything anywhere just by thinking it was where he wanted it. He flew out over the prison above the solid square heart of interlocking cellblocks, over the cream stucco and red tile of the education building, where in another incarnation he had once worked, he passed along the length of the old industrial building and around the walls that closed in the lower yard, noting the laundry, the foundry, the power plant, and pausing to float high above the sally port he caused its double gates to be deposited in the Sahara. Then he drifted over the athletic field and dispatched the metal goalposts to the Gobi. Turning back to the old industrial building he removed all the fire escapes that clung to it like blackened ivy and lodged them on a glacier north of Mount Doonerak. He stripped the gun rail from the north block and watched it vanish into the Brazilian rain forest. The all-clear light followed. The chair from the gas chamber, an apple green with sturdy straps, he deposited in the governor’s mansion, drawn up to the table ready for the governor’s breakfast.
    As a last gesture, he hoisted the roof from the rain shed, a thousand square feet of galvanized iron, and wedged it into a rocky pass near the top of the Canadian Rockies.
    He did not intend to be destructive, he thought, still drifting through the cool night; he only wanted to disrupt their air of grim seriousness and point out that they were all involved in the same cosmic joke.
    The fun would come in the morning when his quixotic subtractions were discovered. He decided to wait. His revenge was Puck’s revenge, a mockery, still he needed to see it, but he saw no reason to wait alone and he began to leaf through the slender album of his experience for a companion. He considered a slender violet-eyed girl named Janice Lee. He had never done more than kiss her and her untasted charms had thus proved more durable. He placed her sitting on the edge of his bunk, and had her turn slowly, her violet eyes opening like soft flowers, to discover him waiting for her.
    â€”Why, Paul—how nice.
    â€”Hello, Janice Lee. Are you still whacky for khaki?
    â€”Oh, you remember that? I married a Navy man. Didn’t I write you once and tell you?
    â€”I think you did.
    â€”I told you how unhappy I was.
    â€”Yes, I remember.
    He reached out to take her arm. He could recall the right qualities of softness and warmth as if he were actually feeling them. He began to concentrate in an effort to bring back every detail, not only of Janice Lee, but of all that was essentially female. He kissed her deeply and her breast formed beneath his hand.
    â€”Why didn’t you answer my letter? she asked.
    Before he could catch himself he had answered, Because by that time I was married myself. And Anna Marie, his wife, entered his mind