I thought jail cells would have metal bars, not automated doors with thick glass windows. They took pictures of my tattoos, the dragon on my arm, the butterfly on my ribs, the trees, the fire. My first night in I did pushups. It’s the kind of thing you do when you don’t imagine you’ll ever return, like it isn’t the start of something.

After, I laid on my back on the cell bunk, clutching a worn, grey towel- of-a-blanket, staring at the metal crisscross support of the bed above me, trying to slow my mind down enough to find a pattern in the coils. It seemed important, a way to decipher the route here. I imagined all the people who’d come before me tracing their own patterns, their finger oils slowly coloring the metal so I could almost sense them there with me.

While I wondered about the ghosts of my cell, my friends were trying to bail me out. The cops wouldn’t let me leave until I blew zeros and that wasn’t going  to  happen  for  several  hours.  I  knew  that,  my  friends  didn’t.  While they waited in the lobby, a group of guys came in wearing primary-colored tracksuits and gold chains. The fake mobsters wanted to bail someone out as well, but the cops wouldn’t let them either. They left swearing in a language my friends didn’t understand.

When I heard the story later, with my new reality—fines, probation, community service, a cycle of mugshots and courtrooms and pleas—firmly in place, I wondered about the fake mobsters.

I wondered if they could have been real, or the closest I could picture—full- on guns and meetings-in-dark-warehouses and names-prefaced-with-simple- ironic-adjectives type of real. I wondered about their friend, if he’d been lying on a bunk one cell over, tracing the coils. I wondered about his tattoos, if he had fire and dragons, though perhaps for different reasons. I wondered what would have happened if, by some strange set of circumstances, the cops would have released me to them that night. If the mobsters would have looked at each other, shrugged, as if to say one is as good as another, and wrapped me up in the shine of their jackets like the wings of gaudy birds.

I wondered if I would have left with them and walked right passed my gaping friends, buffeted toward new violence.

Evan James Sheldon’s work has appeared in the American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and the Maine Review, among other journals. He is a senior editor for F(r)iction and the Editorial Director for Brink Literacy Project. You can find him online at evanjamessheldon.com.

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