Pirates To the Top Left of the Prison Wing - Flash Fiction by Paul Tristram

 

Pirates To the Top Left of the Prison Wing

Flash Fiction

by Paul Tristram 

 

“… and right up here, on this left side of the 3’s, we have the Pirates.

 

Ah-ha, I can see what you’re thinking, ‘Why give them the view of the Sea?’ Well, that is exactly what we thought, at first.

 

When the Prison was built, nigh on ten year ago now, we stuck the horrible buggers down on the 1’s, you can’t even taste or smell the salty, sea air down there. It was an absolute nightmare.

  

We have all sorts of Villains and Rogues in yuh, but you get half a dozen Pirates in amongst them and all hell breaks loose. We were losing Guards left, right and bloody centre (and trust me that ‘Bloody’ I just inserted was needed).

 

Then after a particularly nasty Affray down on the Harbour side of the city, we got twenty Pirates in one go through those damned Prison Gates. We had to stick one of them up on the 2’s, the 1’s were crammed full of ‘em.

 

Obviously, we expected trouble, and we had a bit too, but we quickly noticed that a Pirate by the name of Hoodwink (the fella up on the 2’s) was quiet whilst inside his Cell? This baffled us, until we worked out that the Inmate who’d previously been in the Cell had been feeding a seagull bits and pieces of dead rat which he’d occasionally catch running through the vent system.

 

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the seagull would flap about most mornings, squawking and a-calling from outside the Cell window (once you start feeding ‘em, they’re almost impossible to get rid of). This acted almost like laudanum to the Pirate, and would make him quite docile for the remainder of the day.

  

On the strength of this, and to test our growing theory, we moved three of the noisiest buggers from the 1’s up onto the 3’s, giving them not only the taste and smell of the fresh sea air, but the sounds of gulls and the sight of water too, and sea water at that.

 

It was like Magic, they almost seem to shrivel up after the first fortnight, it’s like a light, or energy, goes out inside of them, and leaves an acute depression in its place.

 

The other Prisoners are far more manageable now, our jobs are easier, and may I say, not quite as dangerous as ‘afore.

 

The only person who’s not too keen on our little discovery is the Hangman. He’s losing work all the time on account of the suicides. When the coastline is full of boats, they’ve been known to start dropping like flies.

 

They’re drawn to those windows, even though the sight is slowly killing them inside, it would be deemed awfully cruel if they weren’t, well, Pirates… but, they are Pirates, so sod ‘em, and damn them down to hell, I say.

  

Besides, every year there’s another batch of the evil swine growing up, or turning, and just a-waiting to take their filthy, thieving, murdering places.

Paul Tristram is a widely published Welsh writer who deals in the Lowlife, Outsider, and Outlaw genres.  He wrote his first poem as a teenager following his release from the (Infamous) Borstal ‘HMP Portland’, and he has been creating Literary Terrorism ever since. His novel ‘Crazy Like Emotion’ published by Close To The Bone Publishing is now available.