Short Story

So, yesterday I thought it'd be a good idea to start a short story. Just because most other peoples' stories bore me to death. I don't pretend I'm a good writer, much less an entertaining one.

Below is the beginnings. Think I should go on?


CHAPTER 1

Jane Hall State Prison
Pennsylvania
Autumn - 2011

My name is Leslie Morris, everyone calls me Leroy. I’m 34 years old. I have no mother and no father either. Ive been here 16 years because I got nowhere else to go - but I keep to myself.

It’s been two weeks now. We’re hungry. Only food we got is whats locked in our cells with us - that’s mostly gone at this point. I have some crackers in my bedpost the others don’t know about.

Some of the others are starting to wonder whats really happening on the outside, the rest of them say they don’t care because they’ll never BE back out there to find out.

Ten days since the radios went out. Eight since the lights. I keep my notebook for all kinds of things, and that’s how I know it’s been 14 whole days just us locked up ones. I miss Nurse Bone. That’s her real name too - Nurse Bone. She’s nice to me - calls me “Mister Morris”. I think she knows I don’t have nobody else.

It’s almost dark now, and we can hear the screaming start. Far enough - gotta be outside the gates - off the prison grounds, but it’s close enough to know it’s not all the way in town. Only thing you can hear from town is the fireworks in July. Wouldn’t hear anything else - especially someone gettin’ eaten alive. That’s my idea about what's goin on. I can’t see it, but that’s the only thing I can imagine would get a person to make the kind of noises they’ve been makin’ at night.

When that screaming starts, we all stop doing whatever we’re doing and listen until it’s all the way dark. After the sun starts to come up in the morning hours, the screaming slows down - it gets quiet again. We hold still and it seems like we barely move or breathe til it gets quiet - even the ones that say they dont care. Maybe it’s because we’re scared. Maybe it’s because we don’t know why they’re screaming. For whatever reason, it’s starting to happen for another night and I’m hungry but I say to myself, nothing about our bodies matter as long as we got ‘em.