A Stolen Prayer
by Mini Acuña
The tired sun draws its beaming orange head over the barren, yellowed rec field hugged by barbed wire. This was always my favorite part of the day: the end when the welcoming night swept over the plains like an old wool blanket, heavy and familiar and rich with the scent of promise and memory.
Since coming to Folsom, the nights have become no more and no less than the day, just as lonesome, just as full of whatever smoke and mirrors my mind can draw up to get through the time. Sometimes, I find myself moaning, ripping holes into the brick wall beside my bed, and chipping my nails to thorns. Tonight, as I rustle my hair against the pillow, I’m reminded of the shadow of a young man trying to sleep above me. He rolled in today, freshly clad in his suit of orange like the glow at the end of a dying cigar, head hung low as metal chains clinked behind him, forcing him to remember how he got here. He’s spent the whole day in bed, meek as a church mouse. You’d think he’s as dumb as a doornail the way he’s silent, the kind of silence that doesn’t ask anything of the room it’s in until he reaches for his pillow.
When it begins, I barely hear the sound croak from around the edges of his bunk above mine: it’s a dry, low drum of a sound that rings around itself in spirals the way a feather does in the breeze. It takes me a furrowed brow and a creak of my bedframe, head cocked toward his, for me to realize it’s his voice. He whines out an incantation so guttural, so hot with its own pleading; it yawns out desperately and uncontrollably like smoke from a furnace and wanders around itself to return back to where it started. It’s in a language I can’t pick apart but can grasp as well as any old sinner who’s walked from Amarillo to El Paso to San Antonio and eventually landed somewhere near the Rio Grande.
His moan forces itself through a windpipe that sounds determined to stay shut, and he prays, pleading, to a God I could never learn to love. It’s like his voice box’s been strung through a broken phonograph: it’s shameful, heavy, intimate, and sounds like the kind of confession that makes you shy, knowing exactly where you steered wrong. Each sentence begins with Dios mío and ends with amen and back again, as if with each rote plea he’ll melt the metal bars on the window and be able to sail away free and guiltless.
As I lean closer and closer to the sagging mattress over my head, the grit in the bedrock of his voice begins to drive through my head like rusted nails. With each round of quiet wails, his desperation pierces itself deeper and deeper into my brow and stings through to the nape of my neck. The pain isn’t what struck me when I first heard the raspy whisper bounce off the dripping ceiling. I swore to myself my first day I’d never pity another man for the trouble he weaved around himself to get here, and, yet the raw hopelessness seeping through the bedsprings above me shrivels up my heart ‘til I feel my eyesight spread even blacker than the summer night floating into the room. His chant rings in my ears and reverberates like a pinball machine. I wrap my hands around my head to block out the noise, to loosen the rubber band that’s squeezed itself there, but the prayer continues. Through the tension and through the blindness, my eyes begin to flutter and leak, and I realize in a red-hot burst of clarity that I’m cryin’ for the man I used to be, the one who still believed God and his angels could save him from his own shadows.