The Boundaries of Reality

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

The Boundaries of Reality

By Plot Roach

Eyes closed, she smelled the steaks cooking on the grill, caramelized onion heaped generously atop them. She got up from her regular table and advanced down the aisle of booths until she could see Scott, the barkeep in his position of power. She heard music from the corner jukebox and the rowdy calls of men as they betted on the game blaring over the television set mounted above the bar. Cigarette smoke wafted through the room, sometimes obscuring the faces of those she passed. But she knew them well enough to identify them by their voices, if not by the smell of the alcohol that they consumed.

She leaned up onto the bar, threatening to push it over if it had not been nailed down to the ground. Scott looked up at her and grinned his devilish smile. “Been a while, Marie.” he said, sliding her a cold beer. “I thought you said that you’d be back soon.”

“I came as soon as I could, Honey.” she apologized, fluttering her eyelashes at him in the way she knew drove him crazy. “But I can’t always control how ’soon’ I can get the time to get here.”

“It’s a shame that you can never stay… I could make it worth your while.”

She leaned closer to him, almost straddling the bar. She could smell his aftershave and all but count the stubble hairs of his chin. A magnetism pulled them closer together, threatening to send them crashing together in a passionate embrace. A hair’s breadth of space, a craving that needed satisfying.

“Time's Up, 742.” the guard announced.

Anita, once Marie, groaned and opened her eyes. She got up from the hard ground of the exercise yard, dusted off her pants and walked back to the holding cage until the security officer could attach her handcuffs to transport her back to her room. The smoke filled, hormone drenched fantasy drained away like an ice cube dropped on a blacktop parking lot. She trudged back to her cell, deflated and in an ill mood. Once the cell door closed behind her, she was back into the real world, the hell she had made for herself by loving the wrong man, and ending it the wrong way when he had left her for another woman.

She received two life sentences for their murder, and though she had hated him enough to kill him slowly, she loved him enough to keep him in her fantasies.

The first few times, she meditated on their early days. A time when they were still innocent to each other’s flaws. When they lied to one another and ended up believing in their own deception. Then came a time when she had made it end differently than it had, where he left the other woman twisting in the wind to be back by her side again. Where they made up as they made love and vowed to never let their hearts roam again. Then, when these paltry copies began to thin from overuse, she dreamed up new places, new situations, where they could be together. Where the past never happened, and indiscretion and murder were never an option.

Anita was walled in on all sides by the ticking hearts and minds of the other inmates. All their emotions running so high, she could barely think straight, much less conjure the peace necessary to enter her other world and see Scott again. She had tried, a few times in the library, in a stolen moment in the night when the lights were out and the others were sleeping, and even once when she had landed in administrative segregation (known as solitary confinement to those who had never been in the system). But she never found the peace and quiet necessary to summon her will and the strength need to go into that other world like she did in the exercise yard.

Perhaps it was the warm sun on her back, the smell of fresh cut grass or the feel of the wind on her skin that allowed her to lie to herself and pretend that she was free of both the confines of her body as well as her jail cell. She had learned how to escape from one world into another from another inmate who had taught her meditation, proving to her that the world of reality was not the only world open to her. “Just because you are here” she said, pointing to the walls of the compound. “Doesn’t mean that they can control where you go in here” she said, pointing to her head and then her heart. That inmate, Lucy, had shown her places with words that she never could have seen on her own in the ‘real world’. And when Lucy died, her knowledge to go further into those places left with her.

She kept her head down, she did as she was told. In another twenty three hours she would be back in his arms again. Back with the one she loved and lost almost thirteen years prior. Back to the place where reality might control the time that she spent in that other world, but never who she spent it with.