The Eyeless Prison

I just uploaded a revised version of The Last 20 Moments to my Goodreads account. It is now called The Eyeless Prison (sign in required) and it is a historical romance about international art thieves at the outbreak of World War II.

This was another assignment for my fiction class, and the exercise for the revision process we had to do was rather interesting. We were required to take our 300 word stories and revise them as seven drafts in seven days, each day focusing on a different mechanic of storytelling: character, conflict, setting, point of view, plot, language, symbol. It was actually shockingly useful, editing has never been one of my strong points, mainly because I have a hard time missing the trees for the whole damn forest, but if this is the kind of stuff I can get out of honing in on specifics then I'm all for it.

* * *

Sobs resounded in the cramped black cell. The man took his ear from against the immobile concrete and whispered through the hole in the wall. “Randolph? Is that you?”

There was a groan. “Thank God you’re still there Murphy, I don’t know if I could have born this any longer, not without you to talk to. The things they did…”

“It’s okay, friend, I’m still here, as much as I wish otherwise. I don’t think they’ll ever let us out.”

“Murphy? This time it was my eyes…”

Murphy sank to the straw and piss covered floor in despair. It was inhuman. When would it be his turn? He could barely remember how long it had been; years lost rotting in this shit-smelling hole. He used to try and count the days, the constant light dancing just out of reach in the thin, barred window by the ceiling. But then it grew dark, for what seemed like months at a time, they must have been covering it, trying to break his will, make him confess to the impossible, the same way they gave him cigarettes without a math, lavish dinners wafting on the other side of the locked iron door. Until Randolph had appeared in the adjoining cell Murphy thought he’d go mad, days pacing back and forth between the tight walls, avoiding the growing pile of offal in the corner. He wondered at what point things had gone wrong.

The last he knew for certain was a confusion of small rooms, train cars tumbling through the ancient, gloomy forests of Europe towards this place, bound and occasionally beaten within an inch of his life. The brown-uniformed officers snarled at him like wolves. They’d stripped him of his good suit and brass pocket watch, waved the notepad in front of his face asking where he’d hidden the secrets. American spy, they barked, and paraded in front of him a panoply of identities that offered some hope of freedom if he’d but given in. Yet he swore these names were not his own, if only he could convince them who he was, why didn’t they see it in his face, the fear contrasted by the electric torches in their rough hands?

“Randolph,” he asked when the man had stopped moaning though the hole, only large enough to transmit their words and cries, “did they get you to talk?” Murphy scratched at his beard, how he wanted to shave it. He wished there was a mirror to se how haggard he looked, but there wouldn’t have been enough light in the cell for a reflection.

“Only so much, doubt they believed any of it, though I swore it was the truth. Ha, as far as I can see it. I told them about us, everything, except what they wanted to know. I’m sorry, but it’s been on my mind.” Randolph’s big mouth had made him the first target of interrogations, but Murphy feared he too would be reduced to this same fate before he saw the light of day again. He tried to remember Eleanor’s face, as she’d stood on their porch in the brilliant Massachusetts spring, a quickly fading talisman in the dim of the prison.

Through the desperate numb of the days that felt like one endless night, Murpy’s only safety, his sanity now was with this friend on the far side of the wall, who once was a braggart and now a shriveled husk of a man. Randolph would tell stories through the ragged hole to keep their spirits up, starting with what he’d do when they escaped and moving on to a progressively incoherent fantasy that Murphy feared was rubbing off on him. He hated the man, but they’d been through so much together, he was all he had. Eventually the two recounted their delirious history, trying to sort out how they’d ended up here, afraid that the answer still wouldn’t set them free.

(read the rest through the link above!)