Many were young, barely adults, working toward their oblivion. They were shackled together under the noonday sun. Sweat darkened their clothes, dripped down into the crevices of their thin bodies. The burn it would make as their sweat mixed with broken skin, because the iron must chafe at their ankles, must by now have caused blisters and sores. They were invisible men. Numbers and not names. They had lost the privilege of being seen, existing on the periphery from the rest of the world, lost and forgotten.

This image of them in chains would never leave her. She could go far from here, put her foot on the gas and floor it, driving as far as she could, using the distance to erase her memory, but it would return. A day would come when she would find herself mouthing off to another kid, telling him he should be better, if he could just act differently, maybe care a little more, and later, much later, she’d realize that she said what she said in a desperate attempt to fight this potentiality.

“This was a mistake,” Mira muttered to herself as she passed them by, thinking briefly she should turn the car around. Several pieces of a tire were spread across the road. Instinct kicked in as she gripped the wheel, forcing the car to veer. She braked, hard, and managed in the last instant to keep the car from careening into a ditch.

“Fuck,” she yelled after it was over, her car still on the shoulder.

Mira waited for the sudden rush to fade. She turned the radio off and listened to the silence. She glanced out the rear window, searching for other cars, but this was a lonely road, like most of her drive to Kipsen had been, and she wasn’t surprised to see she was alone. Alone except for the chain gang of prisoners now far on down. From this distance, the men were almost indistinguishable, only figures moving along. They crouched low in the ditch, searching for the discarded among the grass—cigarette butts, plastic grocery bags, fast-food wrappers. Their faces pointed down. A few periodically glanced ahead, looking to see how much farther they had left to go. They continued their repetitive movements. Their grab and throw. Step, step. Lean, grab, throw again. Step. Their gloved hands picked the trash from the dirt and threw it in the large plastic bags they carried alongside before continuing on the path.