incarceration

Plantman was surprised, but not shocked, to find The Mayor’s office decorated entirely with imitation plants. He brushed wax leaves with his trusty feather-duster. He tested the moisture-content of tinsel soil, clipped plastic Ivy with imaginary scissors.
The Mayor sat quietly at his enormous desk, playing with a wooden sculpture of a bull with the sword of an unseen matador jutting from its side.
At last the Mayor spoke.
“You’ve been a very naughty Plantman, Plantman.”
“I? How so?”
“I know all about you.”
“Everyone knows me. I’m Plantman.”

The Dissenting Judge,  frail,  old,  overwhelmed,  bored with data,  welcomed the coming of Plantman.
“You are fortunate, Plantman.  Your life is lived tending fruits of the earth.  I am beset with human cares. . . “
“You look tired,” Plantman said.

As Plantman waited in the lobby for a CGC Official to lead him to his next task, he was approached by a Lobbyist pitching Dereliction Deterrent Technologies (DDT),  a subsidiary of Tree of Knowledge Incorporated (TKI).
The Lobbyist pitched the products of DDT to The Lawmakers, who would have to choose a method of execution concomitant with the values of The City.
The Lobbyist spoke in earnest, as if Plantman were a Lawmaker himself.

Plantman, working abundant foliage in the Office of the Prosecutor, suffered the Prosecutor’s draft oration, which the Prosecutor practiced, without the least self-consciousness or awareness of Plantman’s presence — or so it seemed — pacing back and forth before his closet mirror.

Inside The City Government Complex (CGC), The Accused languished in his vault. His Last Request:  to see his beloved African Violet, Rose, tended by Plantman.
This request created a host of difficulties. Officials were bound to honor the request, but none would allow Plantman to enter the CGC without tending their plants too. Long day ahead. Plantman arrived early, before protesters gathered for and against the execution of the Accused. Rhetoric, megaphones, home-made signs.

Supporters rally in snowstorm outside maximum security prison to show solidarity for prisoners being held without charges or release date.

Dusty manual typewriter;  messy desk.  The Solitary Novelist reclined greasy on his musty couch, meandering mildew of regret.
“Who buys me?  Who reads me? What matters if I give away my work?”
Solitary eyes.
“I heard it was, after all, just talk,” he said. “Pursuit of pure talk.”
Solitary thought.
“My life missed in this room.  Women, sunlit moments, strolling The Big Park…”
Patient Novelist.
“Occasionally someone is right about something, but EVERYONE is ALWAYS wrong about EVERYTHING.”
Cigarettes, bourbon, tropes, clichés.

The Possessed Man is not a bad man, nor a good one. He is terrified. Alone among friends and family, he “works” to support his family, but is not exactly sure of what he does. He “administrates creative product strategies,” according to the Job Description on file at Human Resources.

Anyone who clings to the belief that serving time in prison constitutes “paying one’s debt to society” has obviously never done time or tried to get a job after being released.  Even if your crime was non-violent and non-invasive (e.g., drug possession) and your time in prison was relatively short, when you get out and apply for a job, you quickly learn (if you didn’t already suspect) that you now carry an ineradicable stigma.

Monthly visit to The City Haven for Adults, see Uncle Joe.
Former salesman, private detective, writer of detective novels, screenplays. Uncle Joe had money stashed. Or so I’d been told. Also told he’d gambled it away. Then again, who was paying for The Haven? Senescence ain’t cheap, unless you live it on the streets, potential guest cadaver of The Death Squad.
He’d been a newspaper columnist, numismatist, a player of horses. He never married, though, allegedly, women craved him, even in The Haven for Adults.