The Weight of Release
The gate at Fenmore Correctional Facility groaned on its hinges like something waking from a long, unwilling sleep. Thomas stood at the threshold for a moment, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and let the sound settle into his bones. Eight years he'd listened to that gate open and close for other men—other lives being swallowed or spat back out—and now it was his turn to walk through it into the gray wash of morning.
No one waited for him. He'd known that before he even stepped outside, known it the way a man knows the shape of a wound he's carried so long it no longer needs examining. Still, some foolish corner of his chest had hoped. He scanned the empty parking lot, the chain-link fence beyond it, the flat sky pressing down like a lid on a pot that had long since stopped boiling. Nothing. Just the wind combing through weeds that had pushed up between cracks in the asphalt, stubborn and gray-green, the only things that seemed to have thrived here.
He started walking.
The bag was heavier than it should have been, given how little it held—two shirts, a spare pair of jeans, a Bible he'd never once opened but couldn't bring himself to leave behind, and a photograph so worn at…