Photo by Khaled Ossama on Unsplash
by Amy Barnes
Christmas songs play on the exercise yard loud speakers because it is December, not because we’re allowed to celebrate in our chocolate prison that some bureaucrat decided needed free white collar labor even though we all now have chocolate-brown ring-around-the-prisoner collar stains.
I groan after eating my breakfast candy bar, remembering Google with its full food buffet of oatmeal fixings and a hamburger bar with hamburgers that weren’t made of chocolate and oh how I miss those days and a balanced diet and my wife and my kids and working in technology without brown stains on my knees and hands.
My assigned task is better than making license plates I suppose, in a huge work room filled with warm chocolate all around as I fill red velvet boxes decorated with foppish green foil bows and filled with rows of festive filled candy destined for under Christmas trees and for parties.
All I did was steal a chocolate babka from a bougie bakery, and embezzle some money, but I do accept my punishment in all of its glorious irony on the factory floor where every prisoner has acne from a constant candy diet.
I wave at No 295 with his hair matted with chocolate that inexplicably drops from the ceiling onto his former CEO shoulders that will be gone by New Year’s Eve, leaving his side of our cell vacant and our escape plan of sawing through not-chocolate jail bars forgotten.
Back in our cell after a long day of making lumpy Santa Claus chocolates who look they’re on the verge of a giggle, I unwrap the candy bar my mom sent me for the holidays with its pictures of snow drifts on the wrapper, and think for a moment I’ve seen a glimpse of my family’s Christmas, but I know it’s not real so I make another chocolate tick mark on my cell and breathe in cocoa dust until I fall asleep.
Amy Barnes is a recent empty nester who writes a little, edits some more, reads a lot, and sleeps occasionally. Her most recent collection Child Craft is available from Belle Point Press.
