The Last Meal

'You got fans,' said the new guard, taking his place in a plastic moulded seat by the bars of the cell – not too near – removing his hat and sipping cafe-au-lait.

'Fuck 'em.'

'Is that how you feel about it?'

The inmate lifted his oiled head from the cot to glance at the clock high on the far wall. 'Yeah,' he said, resting his head again, 'useless fuckers. So fuck 'em.'

'When was you first scheduled?'

The guard and the inmate knew each other like cubicle neighbors, and had been able to share such easy uninspired talk. Sometimes the inmate felt like talking, sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he wished the guard would shut the hell up.

'October 8, 1998. Three fifteen a.m..' An indelible time and date.

'So they got you something. Fourteen years doesn't sound so useless to me.'

'And what're my lawyers? What do you think they're paid for?'

'Whatever,' said the guard, genuinely having lost interest in the thread.

In any case, fourteen years in the Death House was not a mercy. Long after the shadow of the needle had lifted (cycles of perfunctory, clockwork appeals and stays made the idea of the day actually arriving as abstract and distant as a heart attack or car crash – and he'd simply stopped considering it), the deranging confinement, the brutality of prison society had eroded his soul to a nub. His spirit was but a small kernel at the center of a large, doughy mass of unfeeling. This numbness was only pierced when his sow faced, woman lawyer had announced (from a distance across the room that might have suggested the inmate had some fatal and communicable disease) that his latest appeal had also failed, and that it would be his last, and the next date would be THE date. The breaking of his deep depression at this news was initially a sensation of pure relief; but that lasted only a time, and now he thrummed with the expected mortal anxiety.

The reality of his coming execution was compounded when, the week prior, the head Warden arrived with a sweaty young henchman who was armed with a laptop on which he frantically transcribed as they spoke. The Warden had asked a series of questions -- a checklist: Anyone requested witness? Any confession? Property to...? Mail addressed to...? What should be done with the remains? And, finally; the last meal.

'Man,' the inmate had erupted with the inanity of it, 'how am I supposed to know what I'm hungry for in a week.'

A sentimental and turbulent dream which took him back to his Mother, and the large tree studded back yard, the barbecue and smoke, to the summers of absolute freedom and abandon, compelled him by way of nostalgic craving to change the order from prison standard issue of burger and fries. He'd had the guard communicate his plea, and the day before, finally, word came back that his revised decision of barbecue, with vinegar, and hush puppies, would be honored. The inmate was, for the first time he could remember, grateful for something.

As the light of day wheeled and the shadows of passing clouds intermittently dampened the room (almost inexplicably for there were no windows), and as the clock ceaselessly, pettily, whirred, the inmate and the guard chatted, played cards, fell silent, and chatted again in turn..

The last meal was due at 6 p.m.. At 5:30 the guard rose from his station and had the inmate, in accordance with protocol, stand with his back pressed against the bars and push his arms in reverse through the grating where they were cuffed. The guard then dragged into the cell a fold-out table, set upon it paper plates and plastic cups. And a ream of paper towels – the shallow, stale kind which shred and were typically reserved for cleaning lavatories. The inmate shifted his weight, and the chains clanked against the bars. The guard noticed the cell was hotter, stuffier than the rest of the room, so he opened a vent which heaved with warm air; at first blowing, then sucking. After a moment, a nearly imperceptible, but nonetheless welcome, draft set in which brought with it the must of the courtyard's vegetation. The draft also carried an ambient chant, a gentle rhythmic white noise, with an occasional thunk. The guard froze, momentarily poised at a lean with his ear cocked, to comprehend the sound. 'Ah,' he said, 'its your fans.' The inmate lifted solemn eyes to the vent. He felt an deep contempt for these people.

The guard slid shut the cell door behind him and uncuffed the inmate. There was an acceleration in things which made the inmate's heart thud. He was now at the business end of events. The guard, infuriatingly, began to talk college football as though the inmate still had the prerogative of such mundanity.

6 p.m. came and went with no food. The inmate who now, despite himself, lived by the radians on the clock, and checked them with the compulsion of a tic, experienced an algal bloom of possibilities when the meal did not arrive. Had there been a stay? Was the governor on the phone now, saying 'just hold off on that meal until we get this sorted'? Or had the inmate simply been overlooked. He lay back on his cot, finding it hard to breathe, until with a quashing, dispassionate calm, a envoy from the outer world wheeled backward into the the room pulling with him a trolley. From the trolley the man handed the guard a box. The guard checked the contents, and asked the man some questions. All the while the inmate lay, unmoving, looking up at the cell's dank, concrete ceiling, tracing cracks with his sight.

The meal came in a styrofoam container. The meat was pressed into a moulded compartment so that it appeared as a single gelatinous mass. It was also stained yellow. 'I asked for vinegar,' the inmate said, 'this is mustard.'

The guard looked up at the clocked, then behind him at the gate. Then he said, 'they ain't gonna change it now.'

The hushpuppies were long, and dark, and crumbled when lifted. A plastic spoon was the only utensil, and it was flimsy, so that the only possible way the inmate could dig into the meat was by following the extended arc of the spoon's shape, cutting with its extreme edge. The pork was haphazardly chopped, and it was mushy. It went down the throat like lumpen vomit, and conveyed a neon tang from the mustard. There was no smoke – the inmate figured it was microwaved. He probed again with the spoon and found that it crumpled at some buried obstacle. Excavating it produced the tawny flat of a pig's ear, which lay like a river bed beneath pooled sauce and fat.

'What's up' asked the guard.

'Why's there a pig ear in this?'

'Dunno. You don't want it?'

'Never liked the ears. Not the feet either. Reminded me too much of the pig.'

The inmate pushed the table to the corner. He gargled and spat his soda. Then he retreated to his cot, where he sat like a child on its edge, looking down between his feet. He felt sick. The protesters' fuzzy song threatened to make him sicker. For a time, the two sat in quiet, listening to that noise.

Then, 'Hey, you think they eat pig?'

The guard said, 'College kids. White. Probably not. Probably damn vegans.'

'They better be. Doing all that hollering. They don't know a damn thing about me. They better have never eaten an animal in their life to be hollering like that.' As he spoke a miraculous vision, a regeneration, began to take place. He watched the ear, from its styrofoam hold, spread like poured wax into an invisible casing, the shape of the whole. A hog there appeared in the corner of his cell, unmoving, with unemoting eyes. 'Get this outta here, man.'

'I'll take it in a bit,' said the guard, checking the clock.

Until now the inmate hadn't considered it; the similarity of his cell to the pens he tended as a child. The size was comparable, perhaps a little larger. Just as barren, just as spiritless, and, now, just as thick with the stench of Death, brought not by time, or by chance, but by means and means alone.

'Where'd you suppose the pig come from?'

'What the ear? Dunno?'

'One of them factories, I guess?'

'Dunno, probably. There's one at the fork, 'bout five minutes down the road. Pretty big; supply the county at least, I'd say. Herbert's.'

'Maybe its from there.'

'Maybe. Don't know how to tell.'

'I want it out of here.' But this time, he hardly said it. It murmured from behind his lips like a groan. Then, rocking like a seasick man, he said, 'Can we close that vent? Those people are starting to piss me off.'

'No, too hot. Any how, they're out there for you.'

'Know they not. What are they saying.'

'Let him – you – go.'

'That's what they're saying.'

'Yeah.'

'They know me? They know what they'd be letting go? Go to where? To pace my fucking pen another thirty years? They're feeling so good about themselves.' How many pork sandwiches or burgers they gonna eat tonight, the inmate thought. 'God,' he said, 'I can tell you one thing. I ever make it out' he glanced at the pig which looked right back at him, 'I'll never touch meat again. And if they want to do something good, tell 'em to go do that. Go protest Tyson.' The inmate flicked from his cot and strode to the cell's edge where he gripped two bars and tugged and shoved – the bar's immovability making him rock to and fro – and yelled 'Go protest Tyson.'

'Relax,' said the guard.

'Get this thing outta here man!'

'Calm down.'

'Stay in your lane fucker.'

'I mean it, calm down' said the guard, half rising from his seat. The inmate did calm, and when he did the guard relented and had his charge reverse into the bars again, where he was cuffed. The guard then entered the cell, and took from it the styrofoam box containing the porcine lobe. The pig, was gone. Looking vacantly up, through things, the inmate felt more animal than man. But the revelation was that it had taken so long to realize it; in here, he had of course been more animal than man. A pig in a pen. 'Think of all them pigs since 1998.' he spoke in lobotomized tones, 'every single one of them. Shitting in the their cells, walking up and down doing nothing, sleeping – if they can. All just waiting to die. And I can tell you one thing' said the inmate, as the guard uncuffed him for the final time and returned to his plastic chair, 'they don't get no last meal.'

The inmate fell back into his cot and pressed the heels of his palm into his eyes until visions popped in the dark behind them. 'Not they don't' he repeated, with the faintest sob.