The goddess straightened, ·[her head bumped a star, brought down a colossal hand, and afloat in the center of her lake-sized palm, there rested a single white rose.]·

IDAHO STATE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION

2021–2030

Seymour

It’s medium security, a campus of low beige buildings wrapped in a double layer of chainlink that could pass for a run-down community college. There’s a woodshop, a gym, a chapel, and a library populated with legal textbooks, dictionaries, and fantasy novels. The food is third-rate.

He spends every hour he can inside the computer lab. He has learned Excel, AutoCAD, Java, C++, and Python, taking comfort in the clear logic of code, input and output, instruction and command. Four times a day electronic chimes sound and he goes outside for a “movement” where he can peer through the fencing to a rising plain of cheatgrass and skeleton weed. The Owyhee Mountains shimmer in the distance. The only trees he sees are sixteen underwatered honey locusts huddled in the visitors’ parking lot, none taller than twelve feet.

His coveralls are denim; all the cells are singles. On the wall opposite his little window is a rectangle of painted cinderblock where men are allowed to post family snapshots, postcards, or art. Seymour’s is empty.

For the first several years, before she gets sick, Bunny visits when she can, riding the Greyhound three hours from Lakeport, then taking a cab to the prison, wearing a surgical mask, her eyes blinking at him across the table in the fluorescent lights.

Possum, are you listening?

Can you look at me?

Once a week she deposits five dollars into his prisoner account, and he spends it on 1.69-ounce packages of plain M&M’s from the vending machine.

Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, he’s back in the courtroom, the gazes of the children’s families like propane torches aimed at the back of his head. He could not look at Marian. Who made the PDF we found on your tablet? Why assume Bishop’s camp was real? Why assume the recruiter you messaged with was female, why assume she was your age, why assume she was human? Each question a needle into an overneedled heart.

Kidnapping, use of a weapon of mass destruction, attempted murder—he pled guilty to it all. The children’s librarian, Sharif, survived his wound, which helped. A buzz-cut prosecutor with a high-pitched voice argued for the death penalty; Seymour got forty to life instead.

One morning when he’s twenty-two, the chimes sound for the 10:31 movement, but the computer room supervisor asks Seymour and two other good behavior guys to stay put. Officers wheel in three free-standing terminals with trackballs mounted in front, and the assistant warden escorts in a severe-looking woman in a blazer and V-neck.