Saving Rain

by Kelsey Kingsley

If prison had taught me anything, it was how to keep a strict schedule, thanks to the rigid regimen they’d kept us inmates on. So, almost immediately after I ate a dinner of canned soup and crackers, I spent an hour pulling down the wood paneling in the second bedroom. Then, I took a shower and got into bed with the book I’d recently started reading—a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems. Harry’s wife had an entire library of books I hadn’t read yet, and I was grateful she had passed a bunch on to me to keep me busy during the hours I wasn’t working or sleeping. Then, at nine p.m. on the dot, I closed the book, turned off the light, and went to sleep. It was a restless slumber, one that kept me tossing and turning, haunted by the past, the silence, and a foreboding that sometimes weaseled into my veins, one I couldn’t shake or explain. One that said the demons from my life before this place were never too far behind.