STEAK AND FRIES

It was day seventeen by my count, three days worth of uneaten food was by the heavy iron door and the whole room was beginning to smell like overcooked peas and sour milk. I had devised a rather unorthodox way of counting the days which was actually far easier than scraping lines into the brick. I arrived here on a Sunday and the vegetables that came with dinner were carrots, everyday thereafter it has been peas. So I have been lining up one pea for every day in the corner of my cell until I get a carrot to replace the six peas to make a week. I now have 2 shrivelled carrots and 3 shrivelled peas making it 17 days.

When I arrived here two carrots and three peas ago the cops had me put the contents of my pockets into a shoebox, I gave them a pack of smokes, a box of matches, ten dollars, a piece of string, my Rolex and a picture of my wife. Ha! My life in a shoebox, I was beginning to think that maybe I had shrunk and been placed into a shoebox also. They had me fill out this form as well; name, date of birth, list and brief description of belongings and final meal. I asked the prison officer what was meant by “final meal” he said something about it was in case things didn’t go my way and if I couldn’t think of anything to just put down the last good meal I ate. I scrawled down “steak and fries and a glass of red wine”. I was sure it wouldn’t come to that, I have the best lawyer that money can buy and he’s been a friend for years; he isn’t going to let me down.

When it came to 3 carrots I began to miss the everyday sounds that I’d become accustomed to and sometimes even found annoying: like the sound of a clock ticking, or the irregular tapping of my typewriter, I was angry at myself for finding them annoying now that I missed them so much.

I closed my eyes and sat back onto the cold stone wall. I imagined a giant clock face with golden numbers and embossed wood and lacquer. I tapped my nail, which had grown longer than I have ever let it, on my tooth. It made a “tick-tick” sound instead of a “tick-tock” So I then went about imagining that every second tick was a tock. I found that I could get close to this if I tapped my canine tooth followed by my front tooth, and after hours of this it became satisfactory enough.

I desperately tried to take myself back to my apartment in New York, sitting by the window overlooking the city beneath. My clock sound was now echoing inside my head but that was only one of the sounds that I used to hear. What about the wind whistling in and out of the roof tiles, the people arguing on the streets below and the old lady yelling newspaper headlines at the top of her tar-filled lungs? I couldn’t possibly begin to recreate all of that in here.

By some horrible stroke of misfortune the man who I am supposed to have killed was the best friend of the guard who brings me my dinner, I had come to find this out via a series of death-threats and angry notes that he delivers with my meals along with a sadistic look on his face.

Peas and peas went by until I gave up with my method of counting the days when I woke one morning to find a mouse nibbling on my vegetable calendar. I continued to take myself back to my life in New York, with all the mundane things that I used to do. I ate cereal, brushed my teeth, sat on secluded park benches and read my imaginary newspaper, the lady from my block shouting the headlines to me. The gentle tinkling of someone dropping coins by a parking meter turned into a harsh, deafening clanking of my cell door opening, in walked the guard with my dinner; grinning demonically, he placed in front of me: steak and fries and a glass of red wine.