Unbroken Journal Issue 1

Arc’s Journey

by Russ Bickerstaff Arc awoke from dreams of being a cube in cold storage. He would soon forget those dreams as he was greeted by the only sight he would ever seem to remember: the inside of his cell. Arc rubbed his eyes and tried his best to muddle through the motions of waking-up. Arc was horrible at waking-up. He never felt as though he had ever gotten it right. He always felt as though he was doing a bad job of it, which made him self-conscious of the whole process and, by extension, nervous about the whole day that followed.

Arc was stretching awkwardly and hobbling around the padded floor of his cold 8 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot cell cube. He had gotten up from a white bed onto a white floor which was bordered by white walls beneath a white ceiling. There were no windows. The only light came in through a skylight that let him know the time of day. This was the way it had been for longer than Arc could seem to want to remember. The days and nights ticked away in the delicately ambivalent respiration of time. Then the door opened.

Arc walked out the door and into a hallway the led through a series of other solitary cells. Little panels on the doors could be pulled back to reveal cells identical to the one Arc had just left containing people who seemed to be having some difficulty waking-up. He heard footsteps and bolted into a rigid posture as a couple of guards led another person into the cell Arc had just gotten out of. He stood there feeling very lost until one of the guards pointed to a sign that indicated where the cafeteria was. Suddenly he felt quite hungry.

Arc walked out into the cafeteria and got lunch. It was nice to be able to stand in line and pick it up himself rather than waiting around for it to be brought to him. It was a very novel experience.

Arc seated himself next to a few others and they began to have a conversation about nothing in particular. It was mindless small talk about dreams, but it was nice to have some contact. Arc hadn’t had contact with another person in longer than he cared to think about. Within a few anxious respirations, he began to actually laugh.

After eating, Arc and a few of the others went out to the courtyard to get a little bit of exercise in.

There was fresh air and clouds with just a hint of sun. Finally there was an opportunity to get the heart rate up. He took deep breaths and gradually became fatigued enough to follow a few others into a spacious cell with a few bunks that they could crash on. The days had begun to pass in this manner. A dreamy sleep would become a slow fumbling into consciousness. Consciousness would be haphazardly thrown-on in the morning. Then there was lunch in the cafeteria and an afternoon in the courtyard before an evening in a cell with a few others that would collapse into dream.

One day in the courtyard, one of the people in the prison had fallen to the ground flailing. Arc watched as a group of people in white came to aid him. They saved his life. Arc asked the guards about the ones in white. His questions eventually led him to a class that took place in the afternoons not far from the cafeteria. Arc began to learn how to help people who might be dying.

After many, many days of wearing white and saving more than a few lives, Arc began to be escorted out to classrooms beyond the complex to teach what he had learned to other people who weren’t wearing jumpsuits like everyone else in the prison. In time, Arc too would shed his jumpsuit and begin to walk through corridors much bigger than the ones he had known when he had worn a jumpsuit. The corridors had no ceiling and few walls except when Arc had elected to