Caging Janus by MacCoy Weil (18, Connecticut)

He sits on his divan bed, hunched over a limp paperback. It’s the same book he’s read at least a dozen times, Of Mice and Men. The camera is an old one, rendering the book in lifeless grayscale. But I’ve seen the cover enough that my imagination fills in the dirt path wending through cyan trees. ​

Behind the prisoner a chipped wall dulls. Deep tallies, etched into the scratchy stucco, dominate the crumbling surface, like scars down an aching back. The room has endured as much as its occupant. Other than the bed, the only furniture present is a tiny wooden table, its edges smoothed for our protection, plus a trash can that serves to collect what little waste the prisoner produces. Gradually, with none of the haste of a man with things to accomplish, he rises and steps to the window: his sliver in the stone, albeit a barred and dirty one. 

Beyond my cell lies nothing. Dust clouds scud across the desert floor, their passage broken only by the odd pile of rock. I look for a few minutes, not seeing. Then I turn my gaze up to the camera, the black void, my portion of the panopticon. Wires protrude from its sides, nestling into the wall like woodworm. Its reflective pupil depresses me, and I trace my fingers over the furrows that line my face. I feel old, though I still remember the young, unbroken man who entered this pit. I wonder if a guard is watching, if he also remembers how I once was. The camera gives away nothing. It is sight in one direction. The cold, opaque eye of my beholder. My thoughts sink with the sun into the west. Perhaps it’s time to return to George and Lennie. But even as I find my page, I sense the endless vigil looming still above me.