Electric Poems

Guarded: Consecutive Substack Story 1148

Photo by Larry Farr on Unsplash

When I was in third grade, Miss Lewellen asked us to write a poem about something we liked that didn’t cost money.

I wrote my poem about lightning.

When Miss Lewellen asked why I liked lightning I knew I couldn’t say the truth. So I said because it was bright and it was fast.

There was a prison riot at Vennimore when I was seven. You could see the guard towers at Vennimore from my bedroom window, so my mom made me sleep in the basement for a night.

I remember seeing the headline in The Register: Uprising, Chaos at Correctional Facility.

My mom told my dad the next morning “One dead at the prison. Way they made that sound on the radio I thought it would be fifty.”

My Uncle Allan came over that night. He was drunk and fussin hard.

The one dead guy at Vennimore was his friend from the Army, a black dude named Pierre Holliday.

Guard in a tower shot Pierre.

Allan and my Dad argued about it, and my mom told Allan to pray for Pierre’s soul, because it was too late for his earthly being.

Allan asked to come up to my room, and my mom made him leave his flask downstairs. He put it on the counter, walked upstairs and knelt down at my window.

I had played army men enough times to know Allan was using his arms to make a gunsight.

When he walked downstairs he told my mom he prayed, then left. My mom asked if he prayed and I just shrugged.

I didn’t tell her anything Allan said, because she’d tell my dad and then Allan wouldn’t be welcome at our house anymore.

There was a real bad storm three days later. Lightning struck the guard tower and killed a guard.

When Allan found out he came over, kinda drunk again, but he looked at me square in the eye and said “I did pray, Nicky.”

They never said if the guard who got killed was the same guard that killed Pierre Holliday, but that lightning made my uncle shut up about killing people.

And I kinda wish I had told my third grade class that.

***

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