The rest of his statement, the lawyer would not accept and refused to pass on to the judge. As if he had the right.

Took back the paper and crumpled it in his hand. Fuck this!

Anything they could do to you to break you down, humiliate you, they would. Orange jumpsuit like a clown. Leg shackles like some animal. Sneering at you, so ignorant you don’t know how to spell your own daughter’s name.

Sure, he feels remorse. Wishing to hell he could feel remorse for a whole lot more he’d like to have done when he’d had his freedom. Before he was stopped.

Covered in welts. Bleeding.

A good feeling. Washed in the blood of the Lamb.

He believes in Jesus, not in God. Doesn’t give a damn for God.

Pretty sure God doesn’t give a damn for him.

When he thinks of God, it’s the old statue in front of the courthouse. Blind eyes in the frowning face, uplifted sword, mounted on a horse above the walkway. Had to laugh, the General had white bird crap all over him, hat, shoulders. Even the sword.

Why is bird crap white?—he’d asked the wiseass lawyer, who’d stared at him.

Just is. Some things just are.

But when he thinks of Jesus, he thinks of a man like himself.

Accusations made against him. Enemies rising against him.

Welts, wounds. Slick swaths of blood.

Striking his back with the rod. Awkward, but he can manage. Out of contraband metal, his rod.

It is (maybe) not a “rod” to look at. Your eye, seeing what it is, would not see “rod.”

Yet pain is inflicted. Such pain, his face contorts in (silent) anguish, agony.

As in the woman’s sinewy-snaky body, in the grip of the woman’s powerful arms, legs, thighs, he’d suffered death, how many times.

Like drowning. Unable to lift his head, lift his mouth out of the black muck to breathe. Sucking him into her. Like sand collapsing, sinking beneath his feet into a water hole and dark water rising to drown him.

The woman’s fault from the start when he’d first seen her. Not knowing who she was. Insolent eyes, curve of the body, like a Venus flytrap and him the helpless fly: trapped.

Plenty of time in his cell to think and to reconsider. Mistakes he’d made, following the woman, who’d been with another man the night he saw her. And her looking at him, allowing him to look at her.

Sex she baited him with. The bait was sex. He hadn’t known (then). He has (since) learned.

He’d thought the sex-power was his. Resided in him. Not in the woman, but in him, as in the past with younger girls, high-school-age girls, but with her, he’d been mistaken.

And paying for that mistake ever since.