As News Spread

Jack sat alone. Seven o’clock, Saturday morning, within cinder block walls and one door with a single window and a gap like a ticket booth through which food is passed, room service pounded on the other side of the door, shouted, “Breakfast!”
Jack stepped off his cot, across the cold concrete floor, and took the microwaved biscuits.
“You want coffee?”
“Yes, please. Is there any way I could get a pen?”
“A what?”
“A pen, to write.”
“No, we don’t issue those,” and the man walked off.
Jack stepped to his steal stool, sat at the steal table implanted into the wall, and ate slow. He wasn’t hungry. Eating passed the time. First he ate the top half of the biscuit, half the sausage, the bottom half of the biscuit, then finished the second half of the sausage, sipping coffee with each bite. He went to the window and looked out, as if looking across a back porch; across a green field where morning birds come and go, grasshoppers flick dew off blades of grass, caterpillars squinch and stretch across leaves; but Jack saw none of that. He saw cinder block walls, a desk, a finger print machine, yellow tape to direct people where to stand for their photo. To his right, Jack read a sign that hung on the wall: “Guidelines for obtaining classifiable fingerprints.” He discovered his right thumb has an irregular print – his only point of pride during his 17 hours in that room.
A room like that diminishes a person. Cold metal, cold stone, emotionless colors. Nothing to stimulate the mind, but they don’t want that. Nothing to stimulate the soul. The one thing that kept Jack’s spirit alive was the thought of how high Ryan must have been to tell the two arresting officers, so nonshalantly, “We’re writers and this is such griss for the mill.”
Jack waited. Time passed like a locomotive unable to gain pace. The flourescent lights never changed and endlessly buzzed their sterile white light. The sounds were the same over and again – the clasp of a door lock, rollrollrollroll of the telephone rollrollrollrollroll, a flushed toilet several doors down, shouts of frustrated arrestees, shouts of jaunty arresters.
“I suppose I’m to consider my life choices and path?” Jack thought. He paced the floor and grew embittered at such wasted time.