Jaime

                                                    Jaime

         “You know, Jaime, most second graders cry because they don’t want to go to school.  You’re the only kid I’ve ever met that cries because you want to go as early as possible.” 
         Jaime’s only response to his father was to maintain the sad, teary-eyed look that his father and only friend, Ben, knew so well.  It always pained Ben to see this look and the ambiance of the bedroom lit only by the early morning’s light seemed to intensify the look and the guilt it instilled upon Ben.  He loved his son more, it seemed than most parents love their children.  Each of them was all the other had in the world.
         “Ok, pal.  Let’s go.”  Jaime’s face lit brightly enough to light the room just before he shot out of the room.  As Ben watched his only son sprint from the room, he wondered why Jaime always wanted to be to school so early; he had no friends that Ben was aware of.  He gave a mental shrug as he threw off the warmth of his blankets.
         Ben was a small man of no more than five foot seven inches tall.  He became aware that his malnutrition caused by poverty had left him scrawny and near skeletal as he looked at his old, size thirty off-brand jeans that had been much to large for his waist for nearly a year.
         By the time Ben had pulled on those haggard old blue jeans and one of those plain, one color, four dollar tee-shirts with the breast pocket on the left, Jaime had loaded up his Spongebob Squarepants backpack and had it slung over both shoulders.  Ben had to laugh at the site of his son hunched over trying to balance himself with the overweight bag on his back.  “Who are you, Quasimodo?  What’cha got in there?” 
         “Books,” Jaime quietly but excitedly replied. 
         “Textbooks!?” Ben was appalled at the thought of his eight year-old son having so much homework.
         “No, Dad.” Jaime gave a little giggle as he took The Hunchback of Notre Dame out of his bag. 
         “How ironic,” Ben muttered.  “Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder and George Orwell.  Pretty high level reading for an eight-year old.  Is this assigned?” 
         Jaime shook his head. “I just like it,” he said with a little shrug. 
         As Ben looked into his son’s bright brown eyes, he knew that Jaime was going to be someone someday.  “My boy,” Ben started rather loudly, “you are the cream of the Richardson crop.  You know what else?” he asked as he knelt to one knee and put his hands on his son’s shoulders.  “I’ll bet you’ll be the first Richardson to make it to college.
         Jaime gave a little smile and asked excitedly and a little impatiently, “Can we go, Dad?”
         “Right!”  He helped his son stuff the books back into the bright yellow bag.  When he looked at Spongebob’s smiling face on the backpack he realized again that though Jaime was smart, maybe smarter than Ben himself, he was but eight years-old and still Ben’s little boy.  “Come on, sport,” Ben said as they began to saunter out the door of their low-income apartment.  Ben could feel his heart warming a little as he felt the boy’s hand slide into his.
         Ben found himself once again surprised at and, in some odd way, proud of his thirty year-old Datsun pickup for not only starting on this cold January morning, but for getting Jaime to school, as it always had.  Ben parked in front of Jefferson Elementary and looked at his son.  He was aghast by how much Jaime reminded him of Renee, Jaime’s mother and Ben’s girlfriend.  He had never known another person with a bigger heart than Renee, until his son was born.  Ben, beginning to feel tears welling up in his eyes, rushed his son by saying, “You better get in there, son.”
         “Ok.  I love you, Dad.”
         Though Jaime told his father that he loved him every day, the words seemed to hold more significance today.  “I love you too, boy,” he told his son during a long hug that seemed also somehow more important.  “Remember that I am working late tonight at the gas station, so I won’t be home until a little after nine.”
         Jaime nodded, jumped out of the compact pickup truck, and ran to the front door.
         As soon as Jaime had closed the truck’s door in his ever-so-gentile manner, Ben let a few tears roll down his cheeks.  As any other father, he would’ve hated to let his son see him cry.  But the tears, rushing down his cheeks like a quickly melting spring creek, were hard to stop.  They were always hard to stop when he thought about Renee.  She had been the only woman he’d ever loved and the two of them had been so happy when Renee learned that she was pregnant.  Ben had asked her to marry him on that day.  They were going to marry one month after Jaime’s birth.  Though they were both but twenty-two at the time, they knew that together they could make it work.  So when she died giving birth to Jaime, it almost ruined Ben.  He was a wreck for over six months before he began to live his life again.  Since Renee died, Ben had been an empty shell of the man he once was.  Though it had been over eight years since her death, Ben thought of her every day and was heartbroken that his son would never know his mother. 
         Ben forced the thought, which had completely engulfed his mind, out of his head; as he did, he slowly began to realize that his K-mart brand tee-shirt was soaked with tears, as were his cheeks.  He thought as he often had, that it was possible that he might need to see a therapist.  He gave a short, pathetic little laugh as he said aloud, “Like I could afford that.”  All day long, Ben couldn’t help but to think of his son, the only person he had in the world.
         When Jaime entered the front door of his school, the night janitor stared at him, refusing to flip on the lights in the corridor.
         “Good morning, Mr. Damm,” Jaime quietly greeted the wrinkled and worn-down old custodian in his sweet-hearted, somewhat bashful manner.
         “How many times do I have to tell you, fatty?”  You cannot come inside until eight.  It’s only a quarter after six!”
         “Yes, sir, but it’s four below zero outside.  I was kind of hoping…”
         “I don’t care how cold it is, fatso!” Mr. Damm said, cutting the child’s sentence short.  “Get the hell out of here!”
         Jaime nodded and slowly turned to walk outside.  He was right, Jaime thought; the boy knew the rules and should have stayed outside as usual.  He felt bad for having bothered the custodian and wanted to apologize, but he didn’t want to bother him again.  It would have to wait for later.
         As he stepped outside and the icy wind hit his chubby cheeks, he wished, as he often did, that his dad could afford to buy him a new coat; the one he had worn for over half his life was tattered with quite a few holes and didn’t keep much cold out.  He held nothing against his father though; he knew that he was doing everything he could to provide for the two of them, working two jobs and all.  Jaime began to feel guilty for waking his father from one of his few chances to sleep.  He would remember to apologize to his dad when he got home from work tonight.
         He walked to the corner of the playground where he usually plopped to read.  His spot was next to the building so the wind was blocked.  The blacktop was covered with hard-packed snow that froze his butt for the first few minutes.  He wasn’t worried though, as he knew that his seat would soon go numb from the cold.
         He pulled Animal Farm from his backpack.  The bag was held together with staples, safety pins and duct tape. He didn’t find it hard to read in the dim morning light, it was something that he had grown accustomed to.
         He read there, in his spot, unbothered for the most part.  The other children, when they arrived, hurled their standard insults at him, but that was to be expected.  Jaime figured that he was getting what he deserved; if he wasn’t so chubby, then they wouldn’t call him names such as “fat boy” and the like.
         Jaime ignored the kids, which he viewed as being better than he was, until the bell rang to signal that it was time for the kids to go inside.  Jaime was so preoccupied with is book and ignoring the “good kids” that he didn’t hear the bell.  Soon, he was snapped out of his trance by snow being kicked at him.  When he looked up, he saw his teacher, Mrs. Mandibell standing over him.  She had never kicked snow at him before, but it came as no surprise to him.
         She was a pudgy little old lady of about sixty-eight, Jaime thought.  She was usually not very nice to anyone, least of all Jaime.  As she stood over Jaime, the two of them the only ones left on the playground, the student knew he was in for it.
         “Jaime Richardson,” she began in the screech with which she usually regarded Jaime, “you have got to be the dumbest little pig I’ve ever had to teach.”  Then she added in a mocking tone, “When you hear the ringy ringy, you go into the big red building.
         “Yes, Ma’am,” Jaime said.  He always regarded teachers with the utmost respect.  He slipped his book back into the bag and zipped it up.
         “Good God, Jaime,” Mrs. Mandibell screeched in disgust, “that backpack is a ratty piece of trash.”  She decided to hurl more insults, this time more personally.  She used an imitation melancholy tone.  “I suppose it’s the best your grease-monkey, gas- pumper father can afford, though.”
         “Yes, Ma’am,” Jaime said.  The verbal abuse she was attempting to inflict didn’t bother Jaime.  He knew that his father was a good, hard working man.  It didn’t matter what Mrs. Mandibell thought.
         “Get your jiggly body inside now.”
         The two walked to class together and, as they did, Mrs. Mandibell, for the first time since she’d had Jaime in class, felt as if she should be nicer to the child today.  The feeling was easily shaken off when she looked at his hideously work-worn backpack for which she held such a high contempt.
         On the way to Mrs. Mandibell’s classroom, there was a mirror with the words “You Are Beautiful” engraved in it at the top.  But what Jaime saw didn’t seem beautiful to him.  When he looked into the mirror, he saw a rosy-cheeked, chubby little boy with shabby teeth and wondered why the other kids couldn’t be nicer to him.  Though they were correct in their insults, he thought, he wondered why they cared what he looked like.  It would have been nice to have just one friend besides his father, Jaime thought as he looked in repulsion at the sad little fat kid in the mirror.
         When he reached his classroom, one of the good kids started the day’s bashing.  “Oh look!  Its Wide load.”  Every student got his or her verbal stab in.  The scene was reminiscent of Caesar’s stabbing in the Shakespearean play.
         Jaime wished that Mrs. Mandibell hadn’t made him sit in the back of the room everyday.  It was a little hard to hear and extremely hard to see, especially since he was in dire need of glasses, a much too expensive luxury.  He had brought the point up to his teacher; but she just laughed in his face. 
There was an up side to sitting in the back; he was behind everyone else so they weren’t snickering behind his back.  When he was in class he was out of site out of mind, which must have been what Mrs. Mandibell was going for.  Now the other kids wouldn’t be preoccupied with making jokes about Jaime, a pastime that the teacher herself secretly enjoyed.
At lunchtime, Jaime ate his hot lunch, which he got for free because of his father’s extremely low income, and resumed his reading in his spot.  He was content to be sitting there keeping to himself; no one was calling him names or kicking snow at him for once.  Suddenly, Jaime’s head was slammed against the brick wall and he was knocked out of his dream-like state with a screaming pain in his head.  He looked up just in time to watch a big kid named Tobias kick him in the face again.  Tobias was an enormous for his age Native American boy with long black hair.  It seemed that he always had a scowl on his face.  He was, as far as Jaime knew, the only eight year-old boy in the world with full-size muscles.  Jaime had never spoken to him; Tobias, as most of the other kids did, simply held an unexplainable contempt for Jaime.  The big Native American was the only one of Jaime’s classmates that ever physically attacked Jaime.  The attacks were always out of nowhere and unexplained.  Jaime had never heard Tobias speak.  He seemed to communicate with his facial expressions.  Jaime became aware that both his nose and the back of his head were bleeding.  Refusing to leave his book behind, he clutched it tight in his hands as he got up and tried to run away.  Jaime didn’t get far before Tobias tripped him and kicked him in the belly.  Jaime, still hanging onto his book as if it could somehow save him, noticed the snow around his face slowly reddening with blood.  Scared, Jaime jumped to his feet and ran as fast as he could to the nurse who, out of duty, cleaned his wounds and told him to go back outside.  Instead, he went to read in his seat in the back of Mrs. Mandibell’s room until the teacher and the other kids came in only a few minutes later. 
The afternoon portion of class was uneventful, other than the awesome pain in Jaime’s head.  Everyone seemed to pity Jaime.  Instead of hurling their usual insults, they only looked at him with abhorrence.  When the ultimate bell of the day finally rang, Jaime was flooded with relief; he couldn’t wait to end the day.  He slung his Spongebob backpack over his shoulders and hunched over for balance.  He walked this way until he found and boarded his bus, bus number six.
         The bus ride went particularly fast today, as Jaime was in a near-hypnotized trance due to the throbbing pain in his head; in fact, he almost missed his stop.
         “Come on, tubby!  This is where you waddle off!”  There was an eruption of laughter from the students.  The bus driver always joined in the fun of diminishing Jaime’s character.
         When Jaime reached the stairs by the door, he felt a sudden, painful pressure on his back.  As he fell down the stairs, his right arm slid between the hand rail and the wall.  When his hand caught and his body twisted, the sound of his arm breaking was sickening.  With his arm broken slightly above the wrist, it was easy for his arm to break free from the hand rail.  Jaime fell out of the bus into the street and landed on top of his head.  The sound that accompanied his disgraceful swan dive likened that of dropping a raw egg on the ground.  Jaime, lying face down and crying in the snowy street, looked up to see Tobias standing at the top of the bus’s stairs with an evil smirk on his face.  He was holding Jaime’s backpack.  Even with his impressive strength, Tobias struggled to hold the bag up with both hands.  Tobias clomped down the bus stairs and stood over Jaime with the bag in his hands.  He noticed that Jaime’s left foot was on the high curb, his left knee still on the ground.  Tobias heaved the intensely heavy bag onto Jaime’s left calf.  The pop that followed sounded like a wooden baseball bat hitting a homerun.  There was also a tearing sound that seemed less intense.  Jaime, crying harder than he could remember crying before, screamed in mammoth agony, “Oweeeeeeee!”  In shock and not thinking correctly, Jaime hollered, “Daddy!  Help me!”  It was the most sound any of them had ever heard him make.
         Jaime wasn’t sure when the bus drove away but when it did, it took Tobias with it.  The other four children that got off at this stop took turns laughing and kicking snow into Jaime’s face.  After a few minutes, they ran towards their homes.  Not to get help, but to avoid trouble.
He was crumpled in the street for what seemed like hours.  He screamed for his daddy to come help him.  All of the sudden, Jaime remembered that not only was his father working late, but even if Ben had been home, he couldn’t hear Jaime in their level eight apartment three blocks away.  He stopped screaming and laid his head back down onto the snowy street.  Almost immediately, he began to see the snow in around his head turning crimson.  Through his shock, Jaime couldn’t comprehend the crimson as being the blood from the wide crack in the top of his head.  He did notice that the red was absorbing into the snow much faster than it had at lunch when Tobias had tripped him.  He also noticed that the snow covered neighborhood had never seemed as beautiful as it did right then. 
         Jaime rolled over onto his back.  It was the most painful movement he had ever made.  By the time the movement had been completed, Jaime’s face was wet with tears.  He made only the sounds that were forced from him by the pain; he knew that screaming would only waste his energy.  He sat up, being careful not to put any weight on his badly broken right arm.  He raised his arm and was completely frightened by the sight of his hand hanging limp from about two inches above his wrist.  Before he was done assessing his arm’s injury, Jaime noticed a large spot of blood-stained snow.  Not where his head was lying, but where his left leg had been.  Jaime now saw that a bone was sticking out of center of his shin, and blood was quickly trickling from inside.  Though the boy was horrified, his feeling was only intensified by the feeling of blood almost squirting from the top of his head.  The blood was flowing down the back of his head, and trickling down the front.  From time to time he could taste it.  It was the taste of his own fear.
         Jaime thought of crawling to the nearest neighbor’s house or apartment, but dismissed the thought.  Most of his neighbors were young businessmen and women who were still at work.  The others were like Jaime’s father and were also at work.  Besides, if Jaime had learned anything in his eight years, it was that no one is trustworthy.  Jaime, once again, was left to fend for himself.
Hoping he could hop home, the second grader tried to rise to only his right foot.  He hopped twice, but rapidly found that he could not withstand the immeasurable pain in his leg caused by jumping.  He sat down in the snow in the same ever-so-careful manner with which he closed his father’s pickup door only a few hours ago.  The boy flopped over onto his belly again, being careful to keep his left toes pointed out so the bone emitting from his shin wouldn’t rub against the pavement.  He found it extremely hard to use his only good arm, his left arm, to pull his body while trying to baby his left leg. 
         Jaime managed to crawl to the other side of the street and onto the sidewalk before feeling the need for a break.  He looked back across the street, which had seemed so far only a few moments ago, and wept as he saw the short distance he had struggled to cover.  There was a trail of blood where he had crawled.  His high heart rate had both of his bleeding wounds erupting now.  He knew he must trudge on.  It would be getting dark soon. 
         As the evening darkness began to set in, the eight year-old trudged on.  His left arm and right leg were pulsating with fatigue.  The two good appendages were all he had with which to move himself.  In what seemed like an hour, he had made it one block.  He noticed his apartment building getting closer.  As he rested on the next street corner, Jaime began to notice the cold for the first time.
         The boy had no gloves, and no hat.  His ears were so cold that they ached.  His fingers were freezing from being in the snow for this whole time.  They felt brittle, as if they could break off at any given moment.  Jaime became aware that if his wounds didn’t kill him, the cold would.  He trudged on.
         The child had finally reached the corner of the yard in which the children that lived in his apartment building liked to play.  Winter’s early darkness had reared its head and night had set in.  Jaime’s uncontrollable shivering was making the pain in his arm and leg indescribably immense.  His pulse had risen so high that with every heartbeat Jaime’s face was warmed by a fresh wave of blood rushing down his face.  Jaime was tired.  Not just because he had just crawled for three blocks, but because, he realized, he was going to die. 
         Jaime was emotionally empty after the day’s events, and physically drained from his bloody trek through the snow.  He managed only to crawl to the middle of the yard before he could make it no longer.  His entire body had gone completely numb; he couldn’t even feel the compound fracture in his leg anymore.  His heart rate and pressure had dropped considerably, and he wasn’t sure his head was bleeding anymore.  He reached up to wipe the blood from his face.  It had become matted on his face as a thick, crimson blanket.  In his darkest hour, Jaime thought of his father.
         Jaime thought of the only person who’d ever loved him.  He remembered the numerous fun times they’d had together.  Ben loved to tickle him from the time he was a baby, and Jaime loved it too.  The father would scoop him up with one arm and tickle him with the other.  He also remembered their trips to the football games.  Ben would hold his son on his shoulders so he could see over the crowd.  They always rooted for the same team. 
         Jaime began to feel like he wanted to sleep now, but he knew it was death slowly creeping up on him.  Only eight years-old, he had lived a lifetime in the last couple of hours.  The boy felt guilty for dying.  He was leaving his father alone in the world.  “After all he’s done for me, this is what I repay him with,” Jaime guiltily thought to himself.  He resumed reminiscing.
         For as long as Jaime could remember, he and his father had watched Spongebob Squarepants, Jaime’s favorite cartoon, together.  Jaime knew that his dad didn’t like the show and thought it was stupid, but he always watched it with his son.  Jaime guessed that his father liked to spend the time with him, regardless of the activity.
         The guilt hit his stomach harder than Tobias’s kick had.  Jaime wished more than anything else that he could stay alive for his father.  Either the cold or the loss of blood rendered Jaime physically unable to move now.  He wished he could at least stay alive long enough to see his dad one last time; he would tell him that he was sorry for waking him up so early this morning.  He would also tell him that above all, he was sorry for leaving him alone, a feeling that Jaime knew too well.  Loneliness was a feeling that he hated.
         “I’m sorry daddy,” Jaime whispered as he faded into the tranquil serenity of death.
         When Ben arrived home at ten after nine in the evening, he was only slightly worried by the ambulance that was just leaving, it seemed in no hurry.  As Ben made his way to the main door of the building, a man who lived in the apartment across the hall from Ben’s and had found Jaime said, “You may want to follow that ambulance, mister.”  Knowing instantly that Jaime was hurt, Ben darted back for his car.  The man added, “No rush mister, it ain’t gonna be any better when you get there.”
         Ben arrived at the hospital before the ambulance did.  In the emergency room, he asked about his son.  His answer came just as swiftly as the swinging doors had opened, revealing his worst nightmare as a parent.  Ben only got a glance at his blood soaked son whose once-bright eyes were now lifeless.  Ben was calm, knowing that having a conniption fit wasn’t going to do anything except make him embarrassed.  He sat down and waited for a doctor that never came.  It wasn’t like in the movies; no doctor came to tell him that his son was gone, but Ben knew.
         After he lost his son, Ben kept to himself.  He never spoke that anyone knew of.  Between the loss of the love of his life and his boy he didn’t have the will to speak.  He was able to quit one job and began to fail to complete his duties at the gas station.  The manager didn’t have the heart to fire him after all he’d been through.  Ben seemed satisfied to silently sell gasoline and cigarettes anyway.
Eight years later, Ben heard the story of what happened to his son, at least up until the bus drove away, from a man he didn’t know in a local bar.  The man claimed he knew the bus driver.  The man slowly moved from his barstool, stumbled to the jukebox and struggled to put in his coins.  While Ben was still trying to digest the new information about his son’s murder, the bartender, who had heard every word of the man’s story, softly addressed Ben.
“Don’t let ole’ Joe fool you, fella.  That cold hearted piece of trash drove bus number six for years, until he retired last year.  He used to come in here and tell the other drunks about every single one of the kids on his bus picking on some poor little boy, who I know now was your son.”  The bartender, seeing the anger welling in Ben’s eyes, leaned in and added, “If you wanted to get a couple of licks in on that jerk I wouldn’t say a word.”
         The bus driver had been in charge at the time of the attack but had severely abdicated his duty to keep the other kids from hurting his little boy.  Ben took the bartender’s consequence free offer to attack the man who was essentially responsible for his son’s death.  With remarkable speed, Ben bounded from his barstool and headed for the man by the jukebox at a full sprint.  He punched the bus driver in the back of the head; his head then jerked forward so hard that it broke the glass covering the jukebox.  The bus driver hit the floor and immediately Ben was on top of him, attacking him with an acid rain of blows that quickly ate away at his head and face.  It took three large men and the bartender to peel Ben off of the bus driver, who was lucky to escape with his life.
The local police thought that Ben had drunk, but when he was given a blood alcohol test he blew a zero.  He had been drinking Mountain Dew.  Everyone involved agreed that Ben’s quiet serenity was exceedingly eerie.
                Because this was the first violent offense on Ben’s record, and in reality the only one he had ever executed, he was ordered to serve a lengthy amount of time in a mental hospital.  After three years there, he was deemed “non-violent” and was allowed to live in the general population with the other “non-violent” residents.  A few months later a new resident was committed.  His name was Tobias Grey Bird.  He was definitely the most massive person Ben had ever seen.  He had to stand at least six feet nine inches tall and was nearly three hundred pounds of solid body mass.  Ben didn’t know what Grey Bird was in the mental hospital for, but he knew that he deserved to be in there for a murder he committed almost twelve years ago.
                The very next day, Ben stole a steel spoon, the only utensil the residents were allowed, from the hospital’s cafeteria.  His thievery had unconsciously occurred.  When he went to bed that evening, he was surprised to find the spoon in his pajama pocket.  Though it took Ben a few minutes to remember where the utensil had come from, he knew immediately what he wanted to do with it.
                Ben was not a violent man by nature, Jaime had gotten that trait from his father but he couldn’t seem to help but to sharpen the spoon.  He had found a “V” shaped spot on his bed frame that reminded him of a manual knife sharpener.  Almost instinctively, Ben repeatedly slid the handle side of the spoon through this “V” shaped notch until it was no longer a crude instrument, but a finely honed blade.  Ben gazed at the sharp edge gleaming in the slight moonlight that cast into his room.  He knew what he would use his weapon for; and he also knew that his body would take the action without consulting his mind. 
                Ben learned that Tobias stayed in the “violent” wing of the hospital.  Been knew from the time he had spent in that particular wing that its residents slept lying on their back with their body, limbs, and head strapped to the bed.  As the notion struck him, Ben’s body began to take control.  With the sharpened spoon clasped in his dominate right hand, he rose from the place he had knelt for hours grinding a blade into his once-dull utensil and strolled toward the “violent” wing.
                His uncontrolled promenade continued until he was standing beside Tobias’s bed.  With is body still in command, Ben forcefully hammered on the massive Native American’s chest until he was awake.  Grey Bird gazed up at his aggressor with a look that asked, “What in the hell do you want?” 
                Ben gave a slight chuckle but said nothing; his mind didn’t have enough control to allow him to speak.  Instead, he answered Tobias’s nonverbal question with a nonverbal answer of his own.  He raised his steel instrument of destruction with swiftness that reminded him of the swinging doors opening at the hospital that day, revealing the bloody mess that was his son.  Ben’s fabricated blade began its tour of Tobias’s bulky, dark-skinned neck at his left ear.  The makeshift knife was sharper than Ben had anticipated; it sank into his adversary’s throat almost effortlessly.  As his blade passed the big man’s jugular vein and pressed into his windpipe, the amount of blood that erupted was astonishing.  It easily shot to the ceiling.  Blood was pouring down the front of the native’s shirt.  Blood was spilling into his windpipe, drowning him in his own blood.  The most sickening sound he’d ever heard, Ben decided later, was the sound of the young man’s blood gurgling in his severed windpipe.
                Ben realized that this not-so-careful incision would have been more than enough to get the murderous job done, but his hand pressed on irrepressibly.  His hand-crafted knife sliced through the rest of Tobias’s windpipe and around the neck to his other earlobe, splitting all of the large veins that took oxygen to the man’s brain. Ben calmly took a step back to admire the one man massacre he’d committed.  He was slightly astonished that he was not disgusted by the scene he had created.  Ben walked back to his room and had what he felt to be the most restful night’s sleep of his life.
                They did not find that the executed man in the blood spattered room until the next morning.  Ben was literally caught red handed for the murder of the giant-sized resident.  The orderlies found it blatantly obvious that he was the culprit when they found Ben, asleep in his own bed, covered from head to toe in crimson, nearly dried blood.
                Ben was placed back in the “violent” wing of the hospital, although he had been as violent as he felt obligated to.  The man was satiated by the violent act for which he never felt remorse.  For boring year after boring year, Ben was locked in his personal room.  Since he spent his days alone, Ben became an avid reader.  He developed into a huge fan of George Orwell, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Charles Dickens.  When he read their work he somehow felt once again close to Jaime. 
                Ben Richardson, who spent fifty-one years cooped up in his solitary confinement-like room inside the psychiatric hospital, died at eighty-one years old from natural causes with his most treasured possession lying on his chest: a tattered, blood stained copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.