850 Bryant
Repatriate yourself! he laughed. Make yourself at home,feel comfortable. I come from a family that laughs aboutconjugal visits. They’re our origin story. My father, keeperof the broken bells and county jails, moved stacks of min-imum sentencing laws over so I could have a seat. Whenhe turned I saw the hump in his back, the bruises fromall the books thrown. When I leave this place, he said,the walls are gonna fall down. He’d been used to keep thelights on. In our imagination it would all turn to dustwhen it was his time to go back out through the revolv-ing door. The dust began to get to me. I heard himcough and felt it in my own chest rattling. I hated to bre-ak it to him that he hadn’t been the only one holding upthe wall. I saw the empty spot in his mouth where a toothhad been. Hope was starting to grow stupidly in its place(as it does in all gaping openings), unfurling and bloomingshamelessly. I turned my face away. He could smell ourlives on us through the plexiglass. He asked me again todescribe how the city looked now from the other sideof Bryant Street. If it looked any different going the op-posite way home.
theatlantic.com
850 Bryant
Repatriate yourself! he laughed. Make yourself at home,feel comfortable. I come from a family that laughs aboutconjugal visits. They’re our origin story. My father, keeperof the broken bells and county jails, moved stacks of min-imum sentencing laws over so I could have a seat. Whenhe turned I saw the hump in his back, the bruises fromall the books thrown. When I leave this place, he said,the walls are gonna fall down. He’d been used to keep thelights on. In our imagination it would all turn to dustwhen it was his time to go back out through the revolv-ing door. The dust began to get to me. I heard himcough and felt it in my own chest rattling. I hated to bre-ak it to him that he hadn’t been the only one holding upthe wall. I saw the empty spot in his mouth where a toothhad been. Hope was starting to grow stupidly in its place(as it does in all gaping openings), unfurling and bloomingshamelessly. I turned my face away. He could smell ourlives on us through the plexiglass. He asked me again todescribe how the city looked now from the other sideof Bryant Street. If it looked any different going the op-posite way home.