Talk is Cheap. Fiction is Free.

The Alley

by JSDuke

I work the graveyard shift at DPS. Texas Crime Information Center. I'm privy to all sorts of nasty information. One of our resources is The Alley.

The Alley runs along the back of my building. It's inside, actually. The name is misleading. The Alley is where the fingerprint cards are kept. Seventy long yards of file cabinets, filed using the arcane Henry-class system, with boxes of even more fingerprint cards piled atop them. Over one hundred years of records. Hundreds of thousands of records...

It's always cold in The Alley. No one knows why.

All those cards, all those finger-prints... Every one of those cards bears a little fragment of the person it identifies. From the oils on the fingers that made it onto the card. A chemical record of a moment in those people's lives when they were the most frightened and angry... Having been arrested... feeling humiliated and ashamed and indignant and powerless...

It's all there. On those cards. In those file cabinets and boxes. Stretched out for seventy long paces of cold air and artificial lighting. The lights flicker. Always.

You can feel it. It's a quiet place. Like a church. The hum of the copiers and clacking of fingers on keyboards doesn't reach The Alley.

Sometimes at night I walk The Alley. Front to back, back to front. Long, slow, reverent steps. Seventy paces takes you all the way down. I feel it. I feel the rage and the terror and the shame. It lingers. It has nowhere to go.

I stop at a random file cabinet and pull out a card. It's a black man, "NIGGER" stamped across the front of it in bright red letters. This one's from nineteen-forty-seven. Rape. Attempted murder. He got twenty years without parole. But sin has an obscene half-life. It lingers. It has nowhere to go.

More than a century of sin pent up in metal boxes, crammed against more sin, evil upon evil, compounding and perpetuating itself. Forming a sort of gestalt of sin. Coming together to make an evil greater than the sum of its parts. It lingers. It has nowhere to go.

All the way down and all the way back.

Seventy paces gets you there. But it takes eighty-one to get you out.

It's a verifiable phenomenon. Seventy paces to the end of the stacks. Eighty-one to get back out. I've paced it out often enough to eliminate doubt.

I wonder. Is it because it's easier to commit a sin that it takes fewer steps to go down? Or is it because it's harder to find your way back out again that it takes more? Both?

One-hundred and fifty-one steps to the end of the stacks and back. One-hundred and fifty-one paces of air that is always cold and lights that always flicker. One-hundred and fifty-one steps through stifling sin, and a silent, unyielding resentment.

I linger. I have nowhere to go.