The Execution of Noa P. Singleton Read Online Free Page B

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel or that Jesus was a Jew. Really, Marlene. This was the best you could find?
    But while I was talking and Oliver was taking notes, I could tell that something was changing. A sudden drop in temperature in the visitor’s room. A slowing of the clock. A stalling of a pulse.
    “I wanted to name my daughter Noa,” Marlene confessed, “but my husband didn’t like it.”
    “I didn’t know,” I said after giving her time to mourn this farce of a loss.
    She lifted the stack of folders in her hands, placed them upright, and tapped them until they fell into alignment. “Well, things don’t always turn out the way we plan them, now do they?” She then leaned back down to her briefcase and put away the folders. “Thank you for your time, Noa. We’ll be in touch.”

    After Marlene and Oliver abruptly left, just as abruptly as they came, Nancy Rae (my sometimes favorite prison guard—she works only three days a week) cuffed me and walked me back to my cell in my own version of the correctional institute Walk of Shame (or, in our case, Walk of Fame).
    It never takes long, particularly because, in recent years, I’ve come to be a model citizen on the Row. When they shout “Hands” immediately after finishing a visit, I walk backward to the door like the queen of England is before my personal Plexiglas court, cross my arms behind my back, and slip them through the opening in the door, where Nancy Rae (or someone slightly less resembling an institutionalized caricature) cuffs my wrists. They don’t apply them with care, and for about three months into my incarceration, I would often return to my cell postvisitations with a scattered sanguinary design, not too dissimilar to those bangle bracelets I used to wear in the ’80s or my favorite diamond tennis bracelet anteincarceration.
    (One of my former neighbors, Janice Dukowski, who was convicted and sentenced to death for paying someone to kill her husband, used to try to kill herself at least once a month by slitting her wrists with her fungal toenails, and you could never pick out the scars because her bloody bangles always covered them up. But I digress.)
    I, of course, am nothing like that now. I always allow my arms to be locked and always hold my head high during the Walk of Fame until arriving back at my cell, where I sit for another twenty-three hours for a single hour of recreation or until another journalist or lawyer wants to come and speak with me. Really, it’s that simple.
    I lie down so much in my bed that my body can’t always handle the mere act of standing upright. Sometimes, when a guard comes to my door and lets me know that I have a visitor, like with Oliver and Marlene, I stand from my bed, and instead of walking toward the bars, I fall to the floor instantly, my muscles atrophied, my limbsbereft from activity, my bones hollow and echoed. Once, I gave up my daily hour of recreation because I was so upset with my mother after she stopped calling and writing for two weeks that I lived within that six-by-nine-foot cell by myself for upwards of five additional weeks, only standing up to urinate and defecate. I found out later that she was on a Baltic cruise with a fireman named Renato, whom she met while at a support group—not for parents of the incarcerated—but for single mothers slash actors sans equity cards. By the time she got in touch with me again, the five weeks were over, and I had to spend another ten trying to redevelop my muscle mass by pushing up from the cold floor forty times an hour.
    Now, though, I take advantage of my recreation hour (often sprinting for fifteen feet at a time, watching television, or selecting new reading material), and I sashay with correctional humility when I’m walked between the visitation booth and the cell as if my handcuffs are actually diamond bracelets, Nancy Rae is my secret service officer, and my cocoa-brown prison scrubs are cashmere shawls.
    At least once an hour,