He clawed at the stone cold walls addictively. It had been a routine, one may say. A routine to show just how stuck he was.

454th day.

     He couldn’t believe it. 454 days in this dump they called a prison. Sneering, he spat at the guard. The guard was new. The young man, who had been quietly standing, keeping guard, slowly turned around.

     “Watcha gonna do about it? Hurt me? You can’t hurt me. They already hurt me, too much for me to feel no more,” the man lifted his shirt, displaying an array of scars from earlier whippings. He looked up after a moment, not hearing anything from the silent guard.

     “There isn’t much left to hurt. Even if there was, your soul is already gone,” the guard said calmly, and turned back around.

     This made the prisoner angry.

     “Watcha talkin’ ‘bout? My soul is here,” he jabbed his finger at his chest, “And it ain’t going nowhere.” Silence. “You get a transfer from some other muddle of a place? Huh? What’s your problem?”

     But the guard just ignored him. The prisoner, too tired and hungry to do much else, went back to the corner of the prison, and lay down on his cot. The event was soon forgotten. But the memory lay there, untouched, until a few months later, a thud and a slam of a door sent him a wicked lady.

     “And for the record, neonatology is a study, you drunkard!” she yelled, shaking a fist in the air. It would have been comical, if not for the attire that adorned her petite frame and the sharp, evil eyes she owned. For, you see, she was wearing a business suit, and not just any business suit. The one that could have only come from one place. The place the prisoner had worked for.
He soon got to know the woman, and was at first elated. She was practically him, only as a woman. They laughed about the same crimes, and cried about the same frustrations, and they were a team against everyone else. Until one day, the one day that changed everything, came along.

     “And so I told her, no, I already killed him! Ha!” she finished. The prisoner stopped for a moment.

     “So you had been lying to her the whole time?”

     “Yes! And the best part, she bought it. What. An. Idiot.”

     “Well, that’s...a bit...horrid, innit it?”

     “Well, of course it’s horrid, that’s why it’s funny!” And so they argued. They argued for days. And the prisoner saw how he looked to other people. A terrible reflection of himself. At first he wanted to die. Then and there. But soon he realized that dying was the easy way out. He had to make it right. The woman first tried to talk to him. He had gone crazy! she said. The statement jarred him. But the man wondered, was doing the right thing really so crazy? Then he decided, if it was crazy, he would be crazy. The crazy old man. His conversation with the guard came back to him. The guard was right. He had lost his soul. The man began doing everything he could to make the people around him happier. After months, he sat down, the thankful expression on the newest prisoner’s face after the man gave him food, still in his mind. The door creaked open. The guard walked in gruffly.

     “You’ve been released.”

     The prisoner looked up at him. Finally, after all this time, he received what he wanted most. Freedom. “I’m...freetogo?” the last words came out in a rush.

     “Free to go.”

     But then, as the prisoner looked around him, it was clear that his work was not done here. There was much to do, and no one else could do it except for him. He had been in their shoes. He understood what it felt like.

     “No,” the prisoner stood up, “I won’t go. I save them. You don’t stop me.”