Free The Glass Harmonica by Russell Wangersky

changed.
    â€œI’m not really supposed to even talk to you, right?” she said, her voice tinny and distant through the earpiece of the phone, and he could imagine she was winding her right index finger in her hair while she said it. “I’m a witness.”
    She said it like it was an important job she’d been individually selected to do, as if the term had a special and particular weight, like it was “I’m a doctor” or “I’m an engineer.” He remembered the way her voice sounded as she said it, remembered that tone and pitch for days.
    The phone was pressed against his ear and he could feel the hard plastic circle of it against his skin, even though everything else around him had reduced in the same instant to a circle of grey, sparkling fog. Behind him, the voices of the other inmates were bouncing off the blue-painted walls in the long hallway, high and harsh, sharp and metallic and constantly in motion, but to Ronnie it seemed as if they were simply fading out of earshot with the impact of what she was saying.
    â€œIf I see you or talk to you or anything, you can be charged again. So it’s for your own good, really, you not calling here anymore. Your mom’s coming to get your stuff and she’ll put it in the basement. And I had to sell the car, but I sent your parents half.”
    Liz kept talking, but suddenly he wasn’t listening, and instead was hopelessly picturing her naked in front of the refrigerator in their apartment, drinking orange juice straight out of the carton so fast that he could hear the sound of her swallowing, the liquid rushing down her throat urgently, like it was needed in some kind of immediate and elemental way.
    And then he remembered the way she would close the fridge door and turn towards him, legs apart, one hand on her hip, not the least bit shy, wiping her lips with her other forearm. He wondered if that whole memory was at risk, if he was now the only one who remembered it, and, if something happened to him, whether all of that reality would simply be gone.
    When he hung up the phone, he figured that, out of the two of them, he was the only one close to crying.
    The guards were slamming the doors back on the range, getting everybody out of their cells at once, forcing them out to exercise for an hour in the prison yard, where the only thing you could see up over the walls was the plastic shopping bags caught in the razor wire and the top of a building that had once been a nurses’ residence. Sometimes the guards took that opportunity to turn a few of the cells upside down, searching for contraband or homemade weapons, so that prisoners would come back and find the only place they had that was even close to home turned over like soil in the rows of a field of harvested potatoes.
    The guards had a small house just outside the walls where they would throw parties on the weekends. Everyone inside thought that the guards went out of their way to be as loud as they could, just so the inmates could hear them having a good time, the guards rubbing in that they could do exactly what they wanted and the people on the inside of the walls couldn’t.
    Other than the searches and the noise, the penitentiary, an ancient grey stone complex squatting at Forest Road, wasn’t at all like Ron had thought it would be: it wasn’t like television, he hadn’t been beaten up or threatened. There weren’t gangs or much in the way of hard drugs, beyond abused prescriptions. Nor were there assaults by burly men in the showers or hissed warnings from guys thick with inky, smudged prison tattoos. Most of the time, Ron was just bored silly, spending every single day in his cell, waiting to hear from anyone, the days ticking by metered only by the small bit of sky outside the reinforced-glass window of his cell and the endless routine of every day.
    The jail was regularly overcrowded, but all that meant at first was that he sometimes