If: Part 2

“Scrambled,” she smiled.
“You owe me.”
Anne.

I half enjoyed the long look she gave me, the type that screeched, beat you to the ground and whispered in your ear while you were half conscious: I have your heart

Cellmate had shaved. He cut his left cheek while doing it, slashes that made him look like a stereotypical Columbian drug lord from an old action movie. He had murder on him. I overheard the guards talking the other day. Several shots to the skull.
Cellmate sat on his bed and looks over his tired, deep nails and then turns to the wall and chips at a tiny groove in the corner of the room. Several shots. Cellmate looked me over. He was double my size, his thick neck carrying heavy squared shoulders and arms that hung in a formidable weight. His lengthy sideburns were graying as they edged closer to his protruded chin. His eyes were dark and held no particular colour. Around his lids, red veins dripped down his face making him look older than he probably was.
“We’ve never met. All this time…”

His voice was deep, thoughtful. I wondered if he meant to speak aloud. His knuckles clenched now and I saw them whiten in an anxiety. He looked at the groove he had been chipping, searching for some answers, a map out of here. His brow tensed. She did that, too. She would do Sudoku puzzles with the same sort of intensity. No one was allowed to speak to her. I bothered her often. Several shots.
“Cole.”
“Mark” Cellmate replied. He didn’t look like a Mark.

Mark stopped scratching and cupped his hands together as if in prayer, a cold glove around a nine iron. Completely at ease. A handgun grasped like a child with her doll.
“Bad choices…” Mark mumbled. I nodded. He smiled at me.
“You don’t talk much, do you?”
I shook my head. Then smiled, turning away.
“What you in for? Fraud?”
What kind of man would pull the trigger? Then again. Then again. I wonder who Mark hated so much.
“No. bad choices…”
Mark smiled at my response, clearly knowing the definition of a bad choice.

“Got a girl out of here?”
My chest burnt. I rubbed it heart, feigning stress or heartburn. I thought she had left that place in my heart. There she was. Like an extended organ you need to live but didn’t know you had. Something you couldn’t pronounce unless you were a practicing surgeon.

“Not anymore.”

Mark shifted and lay on his back, hands behind his head as if he were lying on a lazy hammock in the Caribbean.
“I shot…” his sentence faltered and died as he turned his back to me on his bed.
“She never saw it coming…” he mumbled after a while.
“I never saw it coming…” I replied. Mark kept quiet, not sure what to make of me.

The coffee was lukewarm. You couldn’t have coffee like that. Even in school, that would’ve been a sin.
“Excuse me? This coffee, can you warm it up?”
The coffee house buzzed with early morning chatter and the news on the television screens propelled on the roof. Steaming machines and tills blinked and screamed. A child was crying and a mother looked haggard. Everything died when I saw her. My body responded and every sense had deadened. I shut down, warped in some formidable time slot between what once was and the rest of my existence. She had answered me and rushed off. I had seen her lips moving. The buzz returned.
The old man was shaking head at the newspaper while his moustache caught the foam from his cappuccino.
“Do you mind if I grab the Sports Section, sir?”
He waved me off, absent-mindedly, then smiled and nodded.
I grabbed the section and scanned the date. April 4^th. I needed to remember that.
I tore off the top of the page that carried the date and edition number. Number 57.
“Sorry about that.” She put down my mug and smiled.
I told my brain to function.
“Do you know what today is?”
She shrugged, looking over at the Sports Section, “An important soccer fixture?”
The old man overheard and mumbled something about Liverpool.
“April 4^th…”
She frowned, trying to think about the importance of April 4^th. A Tuesday morning.
She looked at me for an answer, smiling.
“The day I met you.”