Fall 2017 final digital.pdf Visiting Hours Trenna Soderling I pushed my hands through my hair, leaning against the window raining or not, the way the air conditioning blew on my face no matter which direction I pushed the vents. I looked at the newspaper on the passenger seat again, the one that had now been there for four months. Its had obsessively read, lay facedown. I sneered at it, cursing myself for leaving it there. I should have thrown it away months ago. I could have spared myself the visceral disgust it linger, let it sit there and mock me every time I saw it. me. The line of stopped trucks, RVs, and motorcycles was so irritating my skin began to itch all over, a rash of stress coating my body. I leaned my face into the air again, felt the hairs whip my face, leaned out of the wind’s path, checked the map to see how much longer it would be. Thirty more minutes. Thirty more minutes of the newspaper staring at me and the engines rumbling and the vents and the sky’s indecisiveness. I turned creatures trapped over the space of a few miles. The line of cars inched forward momentarily and stopped again. I slammed on the brakes and screamed in frustration, hitting my hands waiting, I saw my destination in the distance. It had to be the jail. Nowhere else would have that many fences. I pulled into the parking lot and approached the building, the fences. Instead, I was met with tan, cinder block walls and a huge metal door with a disproportionately small window set in the middle. The stone was almost worse than the fences; heavy, unyielding, secretive. Visiting Hours The guard inside was just as unfriendly. I assume she had been hardened by years of watching children, spouses, and parents approach thousands, even hundreds of thousands of visitors walk by her into despair. began speaking, a speech apparently so routine that she only glanced up from her monitor once while giving it. this form.” of the glass. I glanced over the pages, scanning for places to put my shaky initials. Once I had turned in the forbidden items and pushed the clipboard back under, she looked through the document with one hand sound. The inside of the visiting room surprised me, a sea of tan jumpsuits and hung heads. Not like what you see in those prison TV shows, the ones nonviolent criminals clumped together to wait out their sentences. in, wanting to hide more of my feet, but I found the chair wouldn’t move, stuck in place not only by bolts but by years of rust cementing it everyone around me, unsure of what to do now that I was stripped of my possessions. Over the sound of the conversations around me, I heard a door swing shut, the same metallic banging that had followed me into the room. I looked up and saw him, the one island of familiarity in this place, the one thing that should have brought comfort, but didn’t. I was suddenly aware of every muscle in my body; felt my lips twitch downward and my stomach heave and my chest contract and the blood rush to my hands, towards me I stood up, sat down, stood up. It was only as I was falling again that he reached me, grabbed for my hands, and held me as I tried to remain upright. “Hi, dad,” I said. I fell against him, felt the rise and fall of his breathing as I used him Trenna Soderling for support. I was buried against his chest, the way I used to hide when I screen. Unfortunately, the disinterested guard picked that moment to look out into the room. “Move apart.” Her voice echoed between my ears, made me acutely aware that I was not at home, that I was here, in a prison, visiting my father. I let go and stood on my side of the table, pausing a moment before I sat down. His movements slowly mirrored mine. He looked around and shrugged. “I’m here,” he said. The drab faces encircling my vision on all sides painted a grim imprisoned nonetheless. He was subject to searches, made to stay in line, to thing those shows all got right: these were not people. They were numbers, I saw his look of shock and pride. It had taken me four years to prove my talent to my director, to get the female lead in any show, let alone a musical. “Wow, I bet that’ll be really great.” “Yeah, thanks. I’ll make sure to record it for you.” of the other inmates. I knew he was trying to convince himself that he didn’t belong there, that he was saner, less dangerous than the prisoners surrounding him. “It was a teapot full of cafeteria beef and water.” I tried not to gag and instead let him purge the stories from his system. The more I learned, the more uncomfortable I became, picturing watching old movies. He was stuck here, with alligator soup and khaki jumpsuits and thick, brick walls enclosing him. I looked at him again and saw not my father, but what the guards, Visiting Hours society’s biggest threat, but an outlaw nonetheless, someone who needed to be locked away in order to send the message that his behavior wasn’t tolerated, that he wasn’t tolerated. I rocked back and forth in my rusted chair, holding back tears, unable to listen to him anymore. He stopped his story and asked me if I was alright. I inhaled, the breaths catching in my “Why are you here? Why did you do the things that got you here?” was not a trait of mine; it never had been. We sat in silence for a while “I don’t know.” or he lost his job or when he left my mother. I went to the bathroom to out a way to stop my heart from beating against my chest, tried to mentally reach inside myself and push it into place as I said goodbye, and gathered my belongings back from the guard. It took all of my power not to sprint reached my car, I opened the door and slid into the seat, only to be greeted by the newspaper. obscuring the story I practically knew by heart. to a felony for the rest of his life. The ink had soaked into the pages, who read the article would never know the way he watched golf because it reminded him of his father or the frustrated rasp his voice would get or how it felt to hug him after he came home from work. They would only ever know that he was part of a drug ring, that he had made a series of They would never know his regret or his depression, would never hear the got caught. They would never know anything about him besides what was on that paper. I sat in my car and tore up the article, piece by piece until no as I drove out of the parking lot, accelerating away from the jail, past the threw them out the window, letting them stream behind me.