Free Sugar Rain by Paul Park Page B

out sentences as the prisoners file past. He projects their tattoos onto a screen. He’s always mixing up the slides. He’s too high to see straight.”
    Lascar Starbridge’s voice was slurred and feeble. As the dancers moved past him, he asked their names, and they would pantomine putting their hands into the projection machine. Another dancer held a spiral pad of drawing paper up behind the judge’s head, and as each dancer passed, he flipped another page over from the back, to show the different tattoos. Each page had a hand drawn on it, and on each palm was drawn one of the recurrent symbols of the criminally poor: a spiderweb, a checkerboard, a pick and shovel, a hangman’s noose.
    In the audience, men and women rubbed their own hands together and they groaned. For Charity there was something poignant in the sound, so that for the first time the drama came alive for her, and she could see a picture of the strange scene in her mind as it must have been, the line of broken prisoners, and among them her own brother, Abu, not the dancer with his greasepaint and his mask but her own sweet brother, standing fat and tall.
    “What is your name?” asked the beadle.
    “Abu Starbridge. Prince … Abu Starbridge.” He was sweating heavily, and the light shone on his bald forehead. His face was dirty and his clothes were in rags, but at the sound of his voice, there was sudden silence in the courtroom. A dozen clerks stopped writing and looked up. The magistrate sat back in his chair, grimacing and showing his teeth. He looked terrified. Lifting his gavel, he half-turned so that he could see the slide of the prince’s hand, projected on the screen behind him. The tattoo of the golden sun seemed to spray the room with light.
    “What’s the charge?” mumbled Lascar Starbridge, grimacing and shuffling his papers.
    “Disturbing the peace,” said the beadle. “Inciting to riot. There must be some mistake… .”
    “Enough,” interrupted the magistrate. “That’s enough. The prisoner is remanded to the psychiatric ward of Wanhope Hospital for observation. Next case.” His cheek was twitching and he raised one hand to smooth it. The pupils of his eyes were shrunken down to pinpricks, and his skin had an unhealthy pallor.
    Prince Abu smiled. “There is no mistake,” he said. “Cousin, please. Might I remind you that the last nine men and women up before you on this charge were all sentenced to death?”
    The magistrate glared at him and leaned forward over his desk. “Are you mad?” he hissed. “You must be mad. Take him away. No, stop,” he shouted, as the guards moved forward. “Don’t touch him. He’s a Starbridge. Are you insane?” he asked, stroking the twitch in his cheek.
     
    *
He was not insane, not yet. But he was tired. All night he had sat drinking and listening to voices in the crowd outside his cell. Unable to sleep, he had pulled a chair up under the window and sat back with his head against the wall. And from time to time the wall would resonate to the sound of some speechmaker shouting through a megaphone. Once or twice he had stood up on the chair to look out through the bars, and then the noise of the people had risen like a wave. A thousand people stood outside his window, in the courtyard of the hospital, in the rain.
    He had sat with a pen and notebook in his lap, thinking to write a poem before he died, something magnanimous and fine, but nothing came. And towards morning he must have slept, for he was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire and breaking glass. Spring sunlight was prodding gently through his window, making a white mark on the floorboards at his feet. The lamps had all gone out. His pen and his paper had fallen to the floor. And one of the hospital orderlies stood before him, holding breakfast on a silver tray.
    Jolted from sleep, the prince woke with a cry. He heard bangs and smashes coming from the courtyard, and the sound of bells. “What … ?” he stammered. “What