Sammi LaBue

The Potter's Field

Eduardo chips at the soil with the tip of his broken shovel. The end of it is jagged, and there is no certain angle to strike with in order to break into the snow-dusted earth. His hands are cracked painfully from the harsh winter wind, and even though he knows working harder might warm him up he hesitates, as usual, to do so. Even more today, because it isn’t like the movies, where he’d need to paint tally marks onto his cell walls to keep track of time, even though he wishes it were. He wishes the answer to his anxiety was as simple as an untallied wall, but he knows exactly what day it is. It’s the date some doctor scratched aggressively with an almost dead pen onto the blank space beneath a picture of white noise that Eduardo’s girl insisted was his baby. The etched in due date that’s been seared into his memory just as harshly as it was written on that photo.