He sits in his cell, his back pressed up against the cold stone wall. In his head he plays Scrabble.
He hates Scrabble.
"Define it!" his sister used to say whenever he put a word down, whether it was well known or not. She would make him tell her what each word meant, and if he got it wrong, she would laugh and tell him he was stupid. "Idiot boy!" she'd say. "You will amount to nothing, you know."
He hates Scrabble.
But he hates this prison more.
In his head, he is with his sister. She is laughing at him. She is prodding him.
She is making him think.
He loves his sister. He didn't always.
No, that's not true.
He always loved her. He didn't always like her.
She was mean to him. But he knew she was doing it because she believed in her "idiot boy." They spent most of their childhood alone. Mother was in bed, with the illness that consumed her.
Father was out. Working, sometimes. Drinking, often.
And then, one day, he was gone.
...
