The 3 basic parameters of hashtag #Valzubiriagenda:

1. We artists and everyone else can write and self-publish art- and artist-related books: memoirs, biographies, art books and art catalogs. Books are forever. Pamphlets and brochures are not books.
2. We announce a schedule of increasing prices of our art pieces, which includes quantities (scarcity numbers) per price point and overall (the total quantity of art pieces we might ever make). This helps art traders, art investors and art collectors speculate or even stop speculating and instead join a community of investors working together to hopefully skyrocket to the higher announced prices in a shorter span of time.
3. We can use the NFT world, because NFTs provide the tracking (who owns what) and trading.

We can also not be involved with NFTs. Stores and individuals can help sell art using online presence and our catalogs in the stores. If this trends, or once this trends, even expensive art can be sold by neighboring businesses, without exclusivity. Commission systems do not have to be standardized. Art investors can produce their own catalogs to leave at the cafés. Even the cafés can produce their own catalogs.
Valzubiriagenda NFTs
NFTs only came about a few years ago. But I had been working on this since the 1990s. I wrote a book, Valzubiriagenda, along with fellow artist Silverio Perez, and released it in 2018 (Amazon and elsewhere), tackling everything related to #1 & #2. We'll come up with #3 in a later book/ memoi marketing book.
Any artist, including tangible artists can release 10,000 NFTs if the artist chooses to do so. For tangible artists, the NFT first becomes an Art Commission Contract for sight unseen, yet-to-be made art. Once the art is made, the NFT becomes proof of ownership that the actual, tangible art is theirs.
Warehousing our tangible art
Another related idea is that the tangible art may be warehoused by the artist so that the NFT traders continue to trade. This means that even 10-ton 10-foot tall sculptures can be owned and traded by anyone without worrying about shipping, reshipping, scratches, smudges, parts breaking off, etc. The newness of the pieces remain because they are stored by the artist, source, gallery, etc. The art piece gets shipped to the art collector, the ultimate owner.
An artist who makes ceramic coffee mugs - smaller art pieces, can release 10,000 NFTs with a schedule of increasing prices so that NFT traders can trade immediately. The 10,000 coffee mugs can get damaged, so as they are made, they continue to be stored by the artist, until the time when art collectors decide to have the art pieces shipped to them.
Why only now?
I decided to write as many book-length memoirs as I can before I came out to promote this.
I'm an artist and an author. Both need time to "master." I would not even fully use "master" on myself, because there's always something new, even to my own art, my own writing and publishing.

I am now claiming that I'm the visual artist who has produced the most artist memoirs in the world. I have 5 on Amazon. I count Valzubiriagenda as both a marketing book and a memoir-of-sorts, because it has a lot of my own life lessons on writing and publishing. I would not care to contest my claim of having the most memoirs. I will release 5 more over the next 3 years.

BARTER! Get help to write, photograph art and publish your books!
Anyone can hire 11 ghostwriters for 11 memoirs. If you can make art, but you cannot write, then barter your forever art with those who can help you produce forever books.
I don't feel the pressure of writing and publishing because I feel my focus should be on art students and art experts who would study my art and my books 100 years from now. Don't expect relatives and friends to read your books.
I call myself the Dollman
For my NFTs, I am proposing to make dioramas - my original, costumed, bejeweled porcelain dolls in backdrops that will also have precious metals and gemstones. This way I can incorporate precious metals and gemstones in my work, to make sure that people perceive my art as expensive, just in case I myself don't become "famous" - there's no need to get world famous. We are artists and all we need to do is to satisfy the art niche.
Use your laptop now!
I will encourage you to start writing your book-length memoir. Write, Edit and then Self-publish it. Get help. Why wait a hundred years for someone to write about you when all you need is a laptop and a nearby coffee shop.
Don't start counting chickens before the eggs hatch. I have encountered a lot of would-be writers who immediately see themselves as bestselling. world famous assets to society. Two even wanted me to sign NDAs (Nondisclosure agreements), because they did not want me to steal their book ideas.
Here's a suggestion. I would not personally do it. From one manuscript can come 2 books: The Original Draft (unedited, with misspellings, considered to be an art piece, scanned pages(?) of your handwritten original effort), and The Final Edition (edited).
PROVENANCE!
Another way to enhance our investability, tradability and collectability is PROVENANCE - how art ownership proceeds through time. The way this can be done is also through publishing books. Everyone can write their memoirs, biographies, art books and art catalogs, including traders, investors and art collectors. In effect, we artists can continue to be included or mentioned in even more books, without any additional effort by us.
You as an investor, reseller, trader, art collector should be able to publish a catalog with 250 works by 250 different artists, but they need to agree to this right from the start - it's your money, you should require them to follow your version of the hashtag #valzubiriagenda parameters, which preferably should include permission for you to publish their art. Why would you track down 250 artists later?
No exclusive contracts
If you're a café, you can call for artists, and come up with a book with for example, 30 artists, with a chapter devoted to each artist's profile and images of the artist's art.
You can distribute your catalogs to businesses and individuals near and far and online.
The book Valzubiriagenda even cites that funeral homes and janitors closets can sell art, with or without exclusivity. Airline catalogs can include million dollar art pieces. Car manufacturers, showrooms and even car repair shops can sell art as well. Everyone should be able to do this, anywhere in the world, especially not just because of the pandemic, but right now, we are in really bad economies.
What's with the name #Valzubiriagenda
I was into conspiracy theories in 2018, and this term, "The Mandela Effect," was popular. I had read many times that an artist coined the term, but I had to research online, for her name, many times, before remembering it. I'm not good at remembering names. It took me a year and a half to finally tell you that Fiona Broome coined "The Mandela Effect."
I also thought I might have to research trademarks and copyrights just to come up with a generic name. So I decided on "Valzubiriagenda." I was not really sure at first, but I decided to use it as the title for my book (with co-authoartist Silverio Perez) so that there would be no turning back and I can move on.
Am I a FUTURIST?
Someone I recently met this May 2022 just called me a futurist.
In the 1990s, I proposed to a pension fund that they can raise billions of dollars, especially for emergencies, or as needed, or out of desperation, if the pension fund purchases a quantity of art from an artist who not only has a current, reasonable price, but an announced future price that the artist wants to reach.
That future price would obviously be higher than the current price. The art commission contract for multiple art pieces can be taken to the fund's financial lender for a loan. The higher future price can be used for financing purposes.
The pension fund's treasurer, a publicly elected official, said this idea might work, but we had to keep this a secret and discuss this some more, because other pension funds might copy and do this prematurely. This idea had to come from the two of us. The treasurer needed his votes and I needed credentials.
Added into the pot was my idea that I, as the artist, will also write one book-length artist memoir. This was and still is a strong factor, because the leadership and marketing books I had read then mentioned a strong tip. If you want to advance in your field, write a full-length book that is related to the field.
Unfortunately, the elected official, the treasurer of the pension fund, who was also a friend, passed away - he was old and had ailments. At that point in time, I cannot just approach another pension fund treasurer to share this idea with.
I realized I had to write a few memoirs. I needed to set an example for other artists, so I needed to write more than one memoir. Then I felt I should also make ready another book - the how-to of what I'm up to. I wrote Valzubiriagenda, which was a memoir of sorts. I knew how long it would take me to write a book, so I had to make sure I can also consider this book a memoir.
In 2008, I imagined that someone like Bernie Madoff, or a fund like Lehman Brothers, would be desperate enough to use this to save themselves and their companies. I was not ready. I had only written 1 manuscript for a memoir.
In 2012, I released Dollman the Musical, A Memoir of an Artist as a Dollmaker. Once again, I was not ready because writing it depressed me a little, and I knew I had to write more.
In 2014, I released 3 memoirs, and re-released Dollman the Musical. Besides releasing regular books, I released special editions of the 4 books, which had a "Special Secret Insert for Bankers," which explains my ideas of an announced schedule of exponentially increasing prices, to satisfy investors, and the publication of artist memoirs, to satisfy art collectors.
In 2014, I also issued out a press release. Google "Can Billion Dollar Artist Save Investors and World Economy Valentino Zubiri PRWeb August 19 2014" and you will see the press release.
What I did was stake a claim on my ideas. I did not promote my books and the press release. I just wanted them to stay online, like a sleeping giant or a dormant volcano. I even designed 3 of the book covers to look like indie books from the 1980s. I was planting the seeds, thinking they will eventually grow and bear fruit in the future.
In 2015, I was interviewed by Richard Syrett, about one of my memoirs, Hocus Pocus Lately. This book is my memoir with paranormal stories. I could have pursued promoting my paranormal stories, but I wanted to be known first as a visual artist and memoirist, so I allowed myself one interview related to Hocus Pocus Lately. Richard Syrett has(had?) his own syndicated radio show, The Conspiracy Show with Richard Syrett, about the paranormal. He also guest hosts on Coast to Coast AM, another internationally syndicated show about the paranormal.
In 2018, I released Valzubiriagenda (co-authored by artist Silverio Perez, a fellow artist). Finally, this book is "the how-to of what I'm to."
I'm going to end this with some strangeness. In 1986, a lady at a religious gathering went into a trance and left a good number of messages. Supposedly, anyone who got into a trance would have messages, but once the trance was over, the person would not remember what was said.
I was not part of the group, but the lady turned her head to face me. She "foretold" that whatever I would decide to do in the future, it will take time, but it will be the right thing. This is one of my stories in one of my memoirs, Hocus Pocus Lately.
The Tulipmania of 1634-37
I discovered that there was this incident of rare tulips becoming collectible during the Dutch Golden Age. There were tulips so rare and so well-desired that their prices equaled to that of a house. You can read more about this online (Wikipedia) or watch a few YouTube videos about it.
Here is the most useful idea that I gleaned from the Tulipmania. The tulip bulbs remained safe inside nurseries. The traders were carrying the deeds of ownership to the tulip bulbs.
Then NFTs came to the forefront
I started learning PHP, an HTML scripting language, and MySQL, the database that PHP can connect to in the background, in 1999, when there were only 3 books about PHP and MySQL at the bookstores.
By 2014, I was trying to figure out how to make the "ledger," or database that can be used to update ownership and who can be contacted. If we are trading art, then the art ownership should be updated.
Then NFTs came about. This can be used as our ledger. Everyone can immediately trade NFTs of future, yet-to-be made art pieces, especially because it takes time to make tangible art.
NFTs actually went a step ahead, by allowing digital art to be traded.
The only setback with NFTs, in my opinion, is that it still lacks a commission system for resellers and representatives.
For example, if a café wants to represent me, then they can promote me at their café and on their online pages. If I make one piece of art that will be exclusively represented by a gallery, then that commission will be different and more specific. As ownership is transferred, the subsequent owners should be able to reset the commission. We should also have the option of giving commissions to hundreds of representatives at one time with different percentages if need be.
The recent crypto crash
Lately, we have observed that NFTs and cryptocurrencies have been behaving like the stock market and other markets. They have been fluctuating.
I believe that it is time for a trend which discourages fluctuation of prices.
I have also seen YouTube videos where social influencers are encouraging us to be on the lookout for exponentially profitable ventures, because we have all seen this happen with the exponential increase of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Let's see if #Valzubiriagenda trends
We can announce present and future art prices. The galleries won't do this (yet?) because they follow a more traditional approach to the business of art.
We have a choice of using incrementally or exponentially increasing prices. We still reserve the right to change things in the future, so everyone should know to follow the latest update.
If this trends, if you as an artist simply announces that you will write an artist memoir, or that you will include the future works in future art books, you might have more art traders, investors and collectors approaching you.
Get your pen, paper and calculator
Imagine yourself as an artist, where you are right now. Let's just say you still do not have a book about yourself and your art yet. Imagine now that you have a memoir out there. Don't you think it makes sense to charge more than what you are charging now? Writing and publishing books is just the beginning. I'm just standardizing this approach. The books also say to do other related projects. In my case, getting Dollman the Musical onstage is one idea. You will have other related projects, but the publication of memoirs, biographies, art books and art catalogs will help all of us.
You can also imagine that a law firm that has meeting rooms, with someone who wants to form a local #valzubiriagenda group, can have meetings. A local café can do the same. Local photographers for your art, writers, editors, book designers, proofreaders and others can join in.
I suggest have printed books to share. 15 copies of your memoir or art books will be better than an e-reader or laptop or your phone to show. These gadgets can be stolen, sabotaged, broken, have coffee spilled on them, etc. 15 printed books means simultaneously showing to 15 people. You can even give them away to potential resellers, investors, traders and collectors.
When it rains, it pours, as in the days of Noah
There's a saying, "When it rains, it pours." There is a negative interpretation and a positive interpretation.
Negative: When trouble comes, they cascade to even more.
Positive: When opportunity comes knocking, more follow suit. We can assume that if one gets our art because of #valzubiriagenda, more want to do it now, because of the rising prices, and FOMO - fear of missing out. What will they lose if they miss the boat?
As I have said earlier, if the #valzubiriagenda trends, if you announce a future memoir or art catalog, you might have an increase of investors, traders and art collectors who would want to check you out. You might encourage more sales. Just remember to write and publish that memoir and art catalog.
There's this saying, "As in the days of Noah." Imagine Noah, building his ark, with members of his own family, putting all his time and effort into it. Noah was a nice guy. I'm sure every once in a while a neighbor offered him coffee, or chai latte, or whatever refreshing drink they might have back then.
Here's the lesson to be learned. Just because they offered him some type of bubble tea drink, or coca cola, they still didn't make it to the ark. Rubbing shoulders with actors does not make you an actor. I have told my artist friends to write their memoirs. They told me that once they see me succeed, after all these many years of seeing my seemingly useless efforts, then they will write their memoirs and follow the road that I had paved for them.
Good luck to them, but if I were you, act now, get my art or make art. Support the 5-year old artist whose parent promised to release a comprehensive art catalog. If you get that 5-year old's art, and mine, I would be honored to be in the same art catalog that you will produce. I'm already successful at that point. You have gotten the mission just right.
I have already claimed to have written the most book-length artist memoirs in the world. Dethrone that claim. Barter. Use ghostwriters. Success to me means facing God one day and saying, I wrote my memoirs and left the world a legacy of books and art. I will not tell God, smiling and proudly, that I encouraged a run for my art by announcing a schedule of exponentially increasing prices that reached 9 figures. I'm sure God knows we had fun.

JOIN THIS GROUP

If you want to try out #valzubiriagenda, in any capacity, join this group. Let others know about this group as well.
If you are an artist, you can let everyone know here that you will produce your memoir, art catalogs, etc. It's okay if you don't know how to go about publishing yet, I will discuss this. Please be honorable enough to produce what you promise to produce.
If you want to meet fellow artists, investors, resellers, etc., join us here.
If you are a book writer, editor, proofreader; if you can photograph art pieces; if you are a book designer, etc., join us here. Let us know if you charge, barter for art, or both.
If you have your own tips and knowledge to share, join us here.
If you have underaged artists you are managing (parents, etc.) join us here.
Join this group if you want to sell works. Post your works. You web links. I'm sure I will.
You can announce meetings in your area. You might have meeting rooms, a café, restaurant, etc. where people can meet. In the future, you can have the regular show and tell, where books can be shown and shared.
​
Thanks for reading. Please let me know if I need to edit some parts. Please share and join this group. - Valentino Zubiri, Dollman, Artist, Memoirist
Underaged artists are welcome here, so please be mindful of your language. We cannot post your adult-oriented art pieces, but you can direct us to a separate page or community. There will be limits to your posts, and there will be adult-oriented art that we cannot allow to be posted.
Thanks for reading. Please let me know if I need to edit some parts. Please share and join this group. - Valentino Zubiri, Dollman, artist & memoirist

I've been working at an SCI owned funeral home for almost 2 months now. I was initially hired as an FDA but have been mostly running death certificates and primarily assisting the embalmers in our care center.
My mother in law passed away early this morning, and wanted to have her service at a specific family owned funeral home that her husband and daughter had their services at previously.
I really wanted to be the one to help make her wish come true with how she told me she wanted to be dressed, and her makeup done, ect. But I'm not sure if a family owned home would allow that, or if there would be too many legalities involved.
Advice appreciated, thanks much

I (22) am a university student who was kind of struggling with stressed from switching from COVID classes back to regular classes about a year ago. Nothing serious, but my stress can sometimes manifest as me looking and acting depressed, when I’m actually just tired.
Quite recently, my high school teacher passed away. I just so happened to be in town in time for the funeral, so I went. I’m not on facebook or instagram or twitter, so my mom had to tell me of his passing. I’m autistic and not great with socializing with people and maintaining relationships, so she often tells me anything that goes on in my old high school. I’m not particularly interested most of the time and just gossip with her to socialize, but since she tells me stuff I tend to not check up on my school’s instagram page and stuff.
The high school I went to was small. My graduating class was only 17 kids. I wouldn’t say that I was close friends with all of them, but we were definitely friends. I unfortunately had a hard time maintaining those friendships after high school due to my lack of presence on social media, so they somewhat deteriorated.
The funeral was nice. I saw people I knew before the ceremony begun and we were all catching up and sharing stories about our teacher. Then someone asked why I couldn’t make it to Cody’s funeral. (Not his real name).
I felt like I swallowed an ice cube. “Cody’s dead?!”
Cody was a classmate who I graduated with. We had worked on several school projects together. For christmas one year, he got me a model of a Mercury rocket, my favorite american rocket. He was a bit mean sometimes, but I know he meant well.
He died a year ago.
I, obviously, didn’t know that he had passed away. I had to find out at another funeral for my teacher. In a way, it felt like I lost both of them at the same time. When I cried during the funeral ceremony, I didn’t know if it was for my teacher or my friend.
When I got home, I told my mom what had happened to Cody. Not to get into details, but his death was particularly tragic due to his young age. She said that she knew, and that she had deliberately refused to tell me because she felt that my mental health at the time was bad. I said “Who are you to dictate when I mourn!”. It turned into an argument.
My dad texted me a few hours ago and told me not to be angry with my mom, because she was trying to protect me. I said that if she wanted to protect me, she could have told me way sooner! I feel embarrassed that I looked like an ass in front of my high school friends and old teachers, and angry that my mom didn’t tell me that he died.
I understand why she didn’t tell me, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.
Am I the asshole?

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven. The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it. She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

not on no police shit everything I'm speaking on obv been made public or is well known
•Was PSO into it wit 700 when they had that funeral? Was Emmitt coo wit CBR or just CO? (Now that I think about it I had mentioned Choppa Tee did use to fw 00 or sb from that side, then she popped out with that song wit Emmitt. Wat if all that lowkey started over a bitch?)
•4way been around for a min and everybody hate them so they gotta be applying pressure. Wats some of they rumored work?
•Besides Trulla and 4way/CGMG, who all in the Mound? I notice bout like (all the 4s,GD,and EBG) alotta clicks always dissing orange mound by saying they don't fw it/ or they sliding trynna send shots over there.
• Who was Cmode terrorizing the reason he locked up rn?
•Is crunchy black son really RR? (If so y bruh still fw Drac like MF aint into wit SVM and bruh even still fw BGE/♠️/CG heavy af too even tho ik he Nless) And did 700 really pull that move on him? Bruh be around alot of different folks/clicks but I don't never hear him being involved in nun
• I been listening to Duke and Kenny lately and them boys really trynna eliminate anything and everything affiliated wit BGE💰/♠️. I had posted a ss Jizzle shared trolling a 🍇 that said he got hit 16x's. In Duke new song he had a line about an opp trynna duck but got popped 15x's. Also seen a post where nunu lil brutha had said some like "7.62 crack a 🎱k" and da sett is known to cap but have they honestly done anything to anybody from YM🎱 or RR1️⃣8️⃣1️⃣8️⃣?
• Is Klayd still da sett? I remember him trading word with sb on fb a while back but then I noticed that TTK movement too. I mentioned this bcs I could sworn Klayd and Wax+Fatcheeze was all ♠️ but you really don't see them claiming Wax nomo since he died. Fatcheeze ♿️even said he wasn't "knocc shit bacc" but I coulda sworn he was puttin on for da sett a lil while ago and used to be in all Klay and Co videos. He was also in Duke video "Certified Stepper" 3 years ago but now look where he stand ( Lil Cheese did make a post saying he was a 🥞 ahh nigga)
•Where does ™️/🦍 really stand amongst all this? They main opp is RPRE. But some of them still fw KSBG/BGE even tho Uncc allegedly was the one that hit DMoney. Y did dolph sign Uncc after that? Cause its rumored 🐬 was Trulla work and some get back. And even though Moe was "friendly" amongst a couple camps Co Murda just said he was they work. So you'll think it'll be some typa fallout. (Same can be said for 700 about Moe but they still fw 30 and da ♠️ nem. Weird cause before they got locked Co Murda and Klayd was sending shots at Lil00 and WDG.& ik for a fact Klayd ™️/🦍k and done dissed Cmode)
•Why did ♠️ and 1️⃣8️⃣1️⃣8️⃣ really fallout...on top of that we see where RPRE stand nowadays (🎱) but sb said when Kee died Jmoney and ™️ was steppin harder for him than the M8B. If that's true y Duke linked up wit the niggas who called the shot and celebrated DMoney death, and not too mentioned signed the "hitman" to they label (PRE).
•If Pooh and Uncc were free, seriously where would they stand? Plus considering politics y Sheisty start fw 00? (30 been had ties to Trulla so he get a pass but I still feel like CG/BGE backdoe Dmoney)
•Who over the King Gates? Cs I remember in one of Cheesedollar videos he said somebody said "they" couldn't be there but they was. Then look where Nuskie got dropped and look what happened to dollar a couple months later. Then look how Jizzle pulled that stunt over there he did. Is ♠️ really active over there?
•What was OTM? I remember sb said alotta KSBG had flipped from that. Ik Dee Mula had said it in "Str8 on Ha". Not too mention why some of da sett "Mussie" use to be YM. Did he flip after that Migo/Corry dude died?
•Where do Murda8/🏁 stand now? It's alleged that 632 dropped JMoney. But 632 shot videos/ songs with CGE/KSBG who remind you still got ties wit ™️. When they spilt Money and Tp did alotta songs wit Ejizzle. And now i notice alotta them be fw 527 and posted on Crockett. Also noting they don't fw AOB or SVM and I'm betting they not fw RPRE since Migo been wit them alot. So is 🏁 still coo wit CG/♠️? (They said YM 🎱 popped TP a couple months ago. possible if dat Fra Train 🥁 dude was they work too?) Ik they fw Guttagang/900 heavy but sb said Duke fw GG too so how that work?
•Was that white Benz used in 🐬 death really tied to Youngsta? I know everybody know everybody but it's obv Yo and Bagg got ties/fw Trulla but is Youngsta's bcs he fw Bobby (Heard youngsta pops was tight wit Train and a big LMG wit rank)? Also is Heavycamp active rn?
• Why everybody gdk? What sets/hoods be causing everybody not to fw em? (Ex: When Mangee got dropped all the 💜💙 over there definitely started dropping rakes and GDK, Ik YM got GDS and so does King Gates, some of CGE especially Wop definitely GDK, where do Duke Duece and his niggas be and wat they be on, ik RR probably drop rakes mainly for 700 but whatever happened to the GDs who took Moochie chain and shot em?)
•Lastly what's really up wit Breadgang/Nless? They always try to distance themselves from CMG but truth be told it's all under the same umbrella. But that ain't my main point. They said Tavo and Nuskie didn't always see eye to eye(Nunu death still seem 🐟y to me). Not too mention Tavo kinda had Klayd and Uncc runnin walka homes but y did paperroute sign him instead of them? Then it's like now Bagg pushin the loaf boys but odd how that really don't include 30 (maybe Big30 don't wanna be apart/ain't feeling it 🤷🏾‍♂️) and Bagg still prolly fw ♠️ but it's like he started being around Cartel nem 🍽⭐️ more. Even got back coo with Finesse which is weird because we kno Dee Mula don't fw him and even tho his lil brother cge, FNG was trynna slide through King Gates at one point. Finesse nem even kinda switched up on No Love for a min too. And how is M8B Shad able to move with both camps at the same time (YM🎱 and BGE💰)? Now BHG. Ik bruh got popped awhile back but dude capped like he'll in his No Jumper interview (regarding Casino Jizzle and Duke). On top of that it's like when da sett started takin they losses he started moving with Tate (1152) more (prolly thanks of the help of Melvo♿️). Even seem like 3️⃣7️⃣5️⃣ decided to quit pushin they shit and instead fall in line wit AOB/Ot3 ("CMO"). 1152 and 1818 try to play like they coo but noway possible wit which side they on they still fw each other. Aob lowkey be saying they'll go against anybody when they mention they an island (Bino kinda had called out a ♠️ mem on fb). Not to mention 30 and BHG still fw Drac like him and MF ain't into it wit ( AOB/SVM,even 700). Then watching one of Duke videos they said a nigga named Earny (supposed to be Head son) was in it, wats up with that? Also heard Zbo and Head was MOBB (along wit Shiesty Pops) so where they stand in all this? Did bagg go to Nunu funeral? Ik 30 lied and missed Scars on purpose but y pay respect to 🐬 ("im not CMG") but say free Dropp? Y Key Glock pay respect to Nunu (who remind you was close asl to Dropp) but then your camp fw niggas who packed him? (Unless they was both throwing shade on the slick). Just like Y Grove acted tough wit Migo but took a pic wit BHG? Shit mad weird.
give me some feedback/insight if yall care to read because just sittin back listening and watching stuff, it's alot of shady and questionable shit going on and certain clicks/people always coming up in the mix when shit go left...make you wonder
*** not trynna be funny but while writing this I could kinda see how Dolph may've got himself dropped

​
Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven.
The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it.
She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

​
Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven.
The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it.
She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

​
Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven.
The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it.
She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

​
Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven.
The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it.
She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

​
Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven.
The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it.
She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.

​
Jasper frowned as he read over the letter, the summons looking like no other mail he’d ever received.
On Saturday, you are summoned to attend Midnight Visitation as part of your rehabilitation. Attendance is non-negotiable, and refusal will result in forced attendance followed by time spent in solitary. Be ready by no later than eleven.
The Warden
“Whoa, that's pretty cool,” said Gavin, reading over his shoulder, “Who do you know that would come all the way down here at midnight to see you?”
Jasper didn’t know, and he told him as much. He was in here for killing the last person who had given a crap about him, and he couldn’t think of anyone who would make the trip in the daytime, let alone at night. His parents had disowned him after he’d killed her, and most of his family refused to have anything to do with him. Some of his cousins would still accept his letters, but few of them would bother to write back. Jasper was perplexed by the invitation, but, by the sound of it, it wasn’t much of an invitation anyway. Attendance seemed to be mandatory, and he was pretty sure most of the guards on the compound would enjoy dragging him there in chains.
The letter had come with their mail, and it was one of the few times the guard had called his name. The last year and a half had been difficult for Jasper, but he was getting used to making it on his own. He’d done it all his life, hadn’t he? His mom and dad had been too busy with their own thing to care about their middle child. Barbara was the smart one, Reggy was the athletic people person, and Jasper…well, Jasper was the screw up. His grades had never been too good, his achievements few and far between, and when Grace had come into the picture, his parents figured it was the best Jasper could do.
Jasper had agreed with them. Grace had been his everything from the moment she agreed to go steady with him. Grace was motivated, a natural saleswoman who had strived for something more than middle management. She had a successful business by the time she graduated college, and Jasper was happy to stay at home and keep the house. Jasper provided her with stability, someone to come home to who lacked the means to do any better, but he couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted.
That's why she had left him, and that's why he had killed her.
He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, couldn’t stand for her to be with someone else, and now he was stuck in Stragview for his lapse in judgment.
That's what made the note so cryptic, and the longer he thought about it, the shorter the list of people who would come all the way out here at night became.
He did a little more than wait, he supposed. Jasper had asked around about this Midnight Visitation, but no one seemed to know much about it. The younger guys all shook their heads, and the older guys clammed up when he asked them. It was like a magic spell had been cast over the whole thing, and when you asked some of these guys, it seemed to sap the life out of them before your eyes. Garth, one of the more gregarious murderers on Jasper’s block, had looked downright scared when he’d asked him about the visitation.
“I can’t say nothin,” Garth had said, “and neither will you once you go. It’s a secret that you keep after that. It’s something that changes you, or you keep going back till it does.”
“What changes you?” Jasper had asked, but Garth wouldn’t say anymore.
“Get away from me. Get away, before he thinks I told you.”
He’d left in a hurry then, their chess game only four moves in, and Jasper found he had more questions than before.
He supposed that all would be answered on Saturday, and as the days passed, he found himself a little excited by the whole idea of the thing.
When Saturday night finally arrived, Officer Gauge found him on his bunk, his best uniform still looking ragged, as he waited for whatever might come. Gauge held out a pair of cuffs, telling Jasper that he’d have to cuff him before they left. Jasper nodded, putting his hands behind his back, but Gauge told him that in the front would be fine. Jasper shrugged, it was his show, and let him cuff him in the front. Some of the guys who were still awake made suggestive noises as he left, some of them telling him to enjoy his “night visit”, but a lot of the older guys were noticeably quiet.
Gauge led him to the visitation area, the little spot behind the staff check-in area, and when Jasper shook his cuffs at him, Gauge told him to sit down and put his hands on the eye hook on the table. There were a few guys in here, some of them Jasper knew, but most he didn't, and they all seemed to be cuffed to the protruding hook in the center of the table. Jasper started to buck, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. Whatever this was, they would have him one way or another. He set his hands down on the table, and Gauge pulled a lock out of his pocket. He secured Jasper to the spot before leaving in an all fired hurry.
Whatever was about to happen, Gauge clearly didn’t want any part of it.
Jasper glanced around the room, taking in the men who sat around him. There were about twelve in all, all of them shackled to the table, and they were all spaced so that at least three chairs separated them from another inmate. Most of them looked confused or unsure, but a couple of them looked like they knew what was coming; knew and weren’t looking forward to it. One of them, a big bald bruiser named Dennis, had his head against the table as he cried nakedly between his elbows. Another who Jasper didn’t know was praying in fast spanish. A third, Jasper thought his name might be Conroy, was thrashing around as he pulled at his bonds. His eyes were roving around like a scared horse, and he kept pulling at his cuffs until he heard a lock click near the back of the room.
Then he went still and Jasper thought he saw him listening for something.
A pair of double metal doors at the back of the room burst open then, and Jasper saw a small group walk in unattended by guards. Two of them were children, a pair of twins who looked ghostly under the dim fluorescents. One was a dark haired woman who sat down in front of the man as he prayed. The last was a tall, homely woman who took the seat across from a younger inmate that Jasper couldn’t put a name to. The young man stiffened as she sat down, and the pair was close enough that Jasper could suddenly see that the problem wasn’t the womans face, but rather what was on it.
She had a crop of mold growing from ear to ear and as it wove around her eyes, it made her look like she was wearing glasses.
“Hello, Emanuel.” she said, her voice thick but not unhappy to see him, “I see prison had suited you.”
“What the fuck is this?” the inmate said, trying to back away and failing as the chains caught him, “you ain’t real. You look like my ma, but you ain’t my ma.”
“Of course I am, Em. How else would I know about how you drowned me in the bathtub? How else would I know what you did to me before you buried me in the basement? How else would I know how much you cried before you turned yourself in? You felt me watching you from the corner of your room, and it ate at you until you couldn’t take it anymore. The same way,” She leaned in slyly as she grinned, “that you ate at me after I was gone.”
The inmates started making a sound like someone choking on air. He kept pulling away from the woman, but the chains brought him up yet again. Jasper looked away, but he could see similar scenes of horror unfolding around him as more people joined them. The twins sat down in front of the sobbing man, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He wouldn’t look at them, couldn’t look at them, but the longer Jasper looked, the more he could see the bruises around the necks. The deep purple marks looked like individual fingers, and they seemed incable speaking through their bruised throats. They sat menacingly across from him, and every peek he gave them was followed by a hopeless cry of terror.
Others came, men, women, children, mothers, fathers, wives, and everything in between. The inmates' reactions were as varied as the specters. One man could only repeat the phrase “I’m sorry” as a half naked boy of seventeen sat silently across from him. The mother and son he had seen first were now sitting with her hands on his as he rocked and shook his head in negation. What could only be an older man's parents asked if he were proud of what he’d done to them, but he only sat silently and stared right through them.
Jasper wondered when it would be his turn, but he didn’t have long to ponder.
“Sorry I’m late, dear. The commute was dreadful.”
His breath came out as little more than a puff of smoke, and when he turned to look at her, Jasper could tell that it was Grace only by the necklace that she wore. He’d given her that necklace for their third anniversary, and he supposed her parents had left it on her when they buried her. Her face, a face he had loved so much, was gone. She looked like a burn victim, like a used up match stick, and the eyes that looked back at him glowed from empty sockets. Jasper wanted to scream, wanted to pull away as her red and oozing hand came out to touch his, but he couldn’t muster the strength.
She was burnt, her beauty stolen in death, and that too was his fault.
After he’d blind sided her, begging for another chance, she had told him to get lost. She said she couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t give her children, and suggested that he go back to his moms house before her new boyfriend found them together. At the mention of a new boyfriend, he grabbed her by the neck as she turned away and slammed her head against the wall of the stairwell outside her apartment. He had kept right on doing this until she stopped struggling, and even then he did it a few more times. He only stopped when her head began to dribble something besides blood and he realized he had broken her skull. He was scared then, afraid that he would get caught, and when he put her in his car, he wasn’t sure what he intended to do with her.
The police had caught him in his parents backyard, one of her neighbors having seen the whole thing, but by then, Grace had been a charcoal briquette.
He’d heard the funeral had been closed casket, but apparently they hadn’t closed it tight enough.
“Whats wrong dear? Didn’t you tell me you couldn’t live without me? I believe it was a little bit before you smashed my head against the wall. I assumed that, since you’d taken all that time to burn me, that you wanted me to look this way. Well, have a good look, Jasper. See what you’ve done to your Grace!”
Every word she spoke sent flakes of her tongue and lips onto the table, onto his hands, and onto Jasper’s face. She was leaning in closer, bringing her horrible visage closer to him, and Jasper felt his sanity beginning to whimper. As she brought the remains of her blackened lips together, he added his scream to the others. As they pressed against his flesh, he let his eyes roll up to the whites. He tried to stay conscious, but the sheer horror of the situation was eroding his mind. This couldn’t be. Things like this weren’t real. Grace was dead, she couldn’t come back to torment him.
As he regained consciousness, he found that he was still chained to the table and the terrible Grace was still sitting across from him.
“You seem to have gotten a little sleepy, my love. That's okay. The Warden was nice enough to extend invitation for the whole night, and I was more than happy to come and see my best fella.”
Jasper screamed, screamed until his throat broke, and when Gauge opened the door at five o’clock, all those present were as silent as the grave.
Gauge led them away like a flock of lambs, easily correcting them when they tried to stumble out of line. He had been doing this for a while, two or three years at least, and he had learned not to question what went on behind that door. He heard begging, screaming, the mad laughter of the deranged, and at the end of the month, he found an extra five hundred dollars added to his check for every Midnight Visitation he conducted.
His smile curdled when he remembered what the Warden had said to him when he gave him the position.
“I know you’re struggling to feed your appetites, and its only a matter of time before you end up inside these walls for doing something foolish. Why not let me help you feed those urges, and in exchange, I won't tell anyone what sort of debauchery you get up to in your spare time.”
The Warden was a weird one, but Gauge had to admit that he always kept his promises.
Gauge wondered what he put these poor saps through, but quickly put it out of his mind.
The Wardens games were none of his concern, and how he chose to discipline his inmates was his business.