Academy Murders: Sled Scraping

The timing of the letter couldn’t have been better. Kim looked at the purple writing again. Elegant and glorious, she felt a rush of the rapture of penmanship. She stopped. Thoughts came to her mind and took precedence in her. She brought about the idealism and the reality of the days that would come when she would be free. That one breath of liberty eluded her but she looked at her arms and thought of wading through water. She peered at her legs and thought of swimming.

When the notion that she was still part of the system that she had upheld and respected came to her brain she wanted to scream. Her hair, she wanted to thrash. Her teeth gnash. As she looked up, she found her spider friend. It constructed the remaining strands of its web. Laughter burst through her mouth. It was like a rising fountain gushing forth water. It was whole and effusive. The power of her laugh even shocked her.

“Jergensen, shut up in there!”

“Go to hell!”

The guard’s keys tinkled as his steps remained steadfast and sure.

He reached her cell.

“Another outburst like that and you’re going in the hole,” he said.

“The schmuck wants to put me in the hole,” Kim replied.

“That’s it….”

“Wait! Look at that spider! It’s home here. Without this space, it doesn’t have a place to live. It is only the spider who knows the way. People would smash them. Take them out of their world. I watch it. I see that it is one of nature’s architects. It is creating its own space with the thought of being its own homeowner.”

“Jergensen, do you need to go to psych?”

“You’re not listening! The spider has freedom because it can’t even conceptualize it. Essentially, it has more freedom of motion than me. I’m here in this prison and it’s weaving. It’s making a home to build for its family. Soon dozens of eggs will produce more spiders and go off and enter cracks in the wall.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care about your spider or anything. I’m just here to keep you quiet. You’re making too much damn noise and I’m here to stop it. Now, stop it.”

Stung, Kim recoiled and her face darkened. In the realm of her own mind she knew exactly what she was doing. If the guard could be away for this long, she could count on how much she could read without being interrupted. Work for her remained looking at the letter and trying to find more anagrams and codes and encryptions could be discovered. As the guard walked away he realized that he was supposed to let the food staff send Kim her meal.

“Shit! Jergensen! Food!”

The sly look curled around Kim’s mouth yet again. She heard the metal tray slide across the smooth concrete. It sounded like a sled scraping the street. Once she had finished the food, carrots, turkey, and peas, she peered at the letter. She scrambled and unscrambled the entire document. Consisting of four pages, she took on the syllables and repetitive nature of the letter. As her heart rate quickened, she put together all of the puzzle pieces that the letters represented.

With a sigh, Kim acted as if she exhaled smoke. Her back was plastered against the wall. The time that the guard stayed away from her gave her the impetus to write back to Yawquisha. With a pencil and a sheet of paper, she jotted down the codes that she picked up on and wrote in the margins the sections where she was still unclear about the ideas.