By Cindy Koch –
More than three decades have passed. I know this only because the marks are scratched into the wall next to where I try to sleep. Sometimes I stare at those crooked lines, losing myself in the valleys of shadows and dust trapped in those tiny crevices. Sometimes I stay up too late counting each slash, remembering, shuddering as the number keeps growing. On the blackest nights, that haunting record on the wall fades into the empty deep. I strain to see a beginning, even an end, but the darkness is too much.
My hands are heavy; my legs are weak. Thick chains have molded my hands in an unnatural posture. Even if I wanted to escape, my deformed fingers wouldn’t know how to turn the key. The evil ground presses up at me, keeping me above her final resting pit below. So, I’m still here. My heart still beats, and my lungs inhale. And I can taste only chalk dust.
Although the prison is lonely, I am not alone. Miserable captives trapped in their own filth are bound up right next to me. Each poor soul is terribly disfigured—hands, feet, face, body, speech. Lines of terrified women, beaten and bruised children, mangled and bleeding men are trapped here. For years, we have existed side by side in bondage, gasping for air and unable to draw our eyes away from our own scratches on the wall.
Guards stomp through our graveyard, rousing us to remember our restraints. They shout and laugh at our weakness. They taunt and mock our bloody brow. They tell us our concrete beds are not that bad. They lie that we can free ourselves from the pain. Every once in a while, a poor bound fool will believe that counsel of demons; he will courageously attempt to break the chains. Wobbling to his feet, pulling with the strength of a mouse, he might balance for a minute or two. Eventually, the weight of the iron shackles causes him to collapse back on to his knees. Those guards of bondage cheer at the sport, betting on the next simple one who will challenge the chains.
Behind the shadows, whispered in the night, I heard a story of one who walked out of this prison alive. He was willingly captured and chained in the heaviest iron. No one knew from where he came, but his confident walk into the prison resembled that of a king. Quietly, he offered his spotless hands to be squeezed into handcuffs. Patiently, he watched each drop of his own pure blood drain onto a shameful throne of muck and filth. He finally died in this prison, but his story had only begun. After death, this man stood up, renewed and refreshed. Light poured from his resurrected face. Certainly, this was no simple fool, caught in the chains of sin. No, He was the holy Son of God, raised from the dead, and his bondage was broken.
But the part that I keep forgetting is what He did next. Right in the middle of the darkness, this bright, new man walked throughout this dungeon smearing his blood all over the foreheads of the sleeping prisoners. Men, women, children barely stirred from their nighttime stupor. But there he marked them his brothers and sisters who would follow him out of this prison.
But those words, that story, seems so far away in the present darkness. I stare at those crooked lines in the wall. I feel the heavy chains that press on my chest. I hear the lies and taunts of the guards. And I close my eyes, trying to forget it all. But sometimes those words, that story, is spoken into my muddy ears. I hear the light, and the iron has disappeared. I am deformed and on the edge of death, but a strength not my own pulses in my veins. I reach up to my own forehead and trace the bloody smear that has marked me to follow him out of this prison.
