Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

inhaled gasoline fumes. They are a vulgar shimmer with no false grace, and a world unto themselves. The flickers are a place where everything exists as a series of jerky movements.
    I can’t stop my hands from shaking, but I cannot feel the cold.
    Last night the Rose had a dream of prophecy and bureaucratic bullshit. She was swimming in a competition, able to literally pull herself through the water by finding handholds in it. After she easily won, the judges disqualified her over some small technicality. She was furious because she recognized it for what it was—pointless bureaucracy.
    She knew it symbolized the case. We’ve seen it time and again. The good thing was that the dream filled her with certainty. She knew that if she could win once, she could win again. Next time she would beat them at their own game. Fuck the lawyers, the prosecutors, the judge, the liars, the police, and everyone else that stands against us. They will never win, because we won’t give up. Knock me down ninety-nine times, and I will get back up one hundred.
    I was sealed inside a concrete box deep in the heart of a super-maximum-security prison several years ago, and since that time have not had fresh air, sunlight, the feel of grass, or anything else people associate with real life. My living space is as confining and unnatural as that of astronauts in outer space. It’s all brought me to the conclusion that I am being treated like veal, and for the same reason.
    The prison administration doesn’t want you to be too healthy, because then you would be strong. The weaker they can keep you, the easier their job is—especially when an execution comes up. If they keep you soft by putting you in a tiny space so that you can barely move, then feed you nothing but grease and carbs, while maintaining a constantly elevated stress level, then when an execution comes up the man tends to die pretty quickly. Hell, most men are usually at least a quarter of the way dead by the time they make it to the death chamber. Actually, I don’t even think I’m supposed to call it that anymore—the death chamber. In these politically correct times they’ve given it some other less self-explanatory name that I can’t quite remember. Still, everyone here knows it’s where they do all of the official killing.
    A friend recently told me there was an article in a national magazine about how super-max prisons drive the inmates insane. I already knew that, because I see it every day. Not so long ago a guard made a mistake and pushed the button that opens all the doors in a cell block at once. One schizophrenic man immediately smashed another’s skull with a steel bar, killing him. Neither man could have been considered sane by any stretch of the imagination.
    Perception becomes distorted in here, which leads to bizarre behavior. It’s because there is nothing for a person to compare themselves to. There is no barometer for judging what is “normal,” so the thought processes begin to gradually drift in odd directions. The next thing you know, someone snaps and begins screaming that there is blood in his food. At first when something like that happened I was horrified and in a state that I can only describe as terrified awe. Now I find a raving lunatic to be only mildly annoying.
    After a while it makes you wonder if you yourself may have lost your mind. How would you know if you had? And the crazy people all seem to think themselves completely sane, so they must not be able to tell the difference. I can’t think about it for very long or I get stomach cramps. The last thing I need to add to my current list of woe-inducing problems is insanity.
    The courts have ruled that executing an insane person is inhumane, so what they do now is begin pumping the lunatics full of drugs a few weeks before the execution date. By doing so they can make them lucid enough to comprehend that they’re being murdered on a given date, which qualifies them as sane. Somehow that strikes me as being far more inhumane than allowing a person to remain in a state where they don’t realize they’re being murdered.
    Don’t get me wrong, I’m no bleeding-heart liberal who believes everyone is a victim and no one is responsible for their own actions. However, I do possess the intelligence and acumen to realize that something is horribly wrong with this system. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know it’s not veal.
    F EBRUARY
    The temperature dropped to around twenty