Rot had a sound. Isolation and biology colluded in the audible disintegration of these caged men. A strangulation sustained over the minutes made hours, the hours made days, the days made weeks, the weeks made months, the months made years, the years made decades, the decades made rot.

Those sentenced to life without parole lived every day knowing the exact place of their death, but not the time. Henry couldn’t understand how they carried on, let alone carried their padded lunch trays. Didn’t they feel it, too? How the rage and shame and regret festered in the air of this place, lacquering them in a scuzzy coat of futility? Could they not hear the same static buzzing in each cell and through every last corridor? It was the fizzle of human decay, which, if he held his breath, sounded like his own molars gnawing raw meat very, very slowly.

Over that perpetual chewing came interruptions. Rubber slipper soles grazing concrete. Conversations compressed into side-eyed grumbling. Jeers. Kissy sounds. Guards doling out commands like asides about the forecast. Buzzers and clanks and the languid tick of a clock’s second hand.

Such a wealth of time. A fortune of hours made a famine for company, a drought of affection. After lights-out, his cell flooded with a tremendous loneliness, a shade of gloom so impenetrable that it threatened even the prospect of morning. The sort of darkness that robbed sight but heightened touch and hearing. But with nobody to tickle or stroke, no one to offer or absorb secrets, what else was there to do before falling asleep other than listen to the concrete? Lying on his side, he let the scent of ammonia and dried perspiration envelop him, while he focused on whatever was teeming deep inside the pores of these cinder block walls. Even though the faint droning was constant, he had an urge to sift through it and locate the source of that clandestine rhythm. A pulse. A beat. Some echo of a lullaby to rock him—on top of this creaking plastic mattress—into sleep, into a dream, before he resurfaced into another tomorrow and more gnawing.

Tonight a new sound came chiming in the distance, bright and spritely, growing louder and nearer. A gleeful thunder. It was the sound of yellow, of sunflowers, of laughter—Mom’s.

He found himself hog-tied and belly down in a lush meadow. Through the swaying grass and cattails he saw her, Mom, wearing her bese saka shawl like a cape. It fluttered gold and phosphorescent in the breeze. She swayed to and fro, cradling a child—his baby, perfect, pink, faceless. She dipped her head. Blew a raspberry on Junior’s tummy. After the silly wet note, the plush honeycomb of her hair swooped back up so she could dispatch more laughter, shameless, radiant, reverberating like daffodils.