At the police station mother and son were seated side-by-side and shackled and holding hands. Helena plucking earth specks from beneath her son’s fingernails and inadvertently making him bleed.  She breathed calmly, she was invincible, she thought. Meanwhile the young man chewed his lower lip and tried not to cry. “Trust me,” she muttered smoothly.

Helena pinched her son, scratched him through his pants with the tips of her lacquered nails. As she petted him, she passed him a shiny silver coin. Milo pressed it into a cheek.

The coppers smelled rattish behavior and hurried up with processing the socio-cyphers in their midsts and sent them down opposing corridors.

Milo and his tremulous lip was introduced to the men’s quarters at the County Jail. Milo jabbered his circumstances to his tattooed cellmate who hushed him with a finger dragged across his neck, and a sneering, “Shut up, ok, Patsy!” 

Milo quietened and rubbed his single silver coin, obsessing at the incremental tarnish.

Helena, in the ladies wing, was comfortable and surrounded by many mothers separated from their children and aching. Helena was a perfect doll substitute, her willowy frame made her seem fragile, ethereal, like wind chimes, and she elicited a tenderness from even the harshest criminals. Guards who could be brutes treated her respectfully, as if she was there by mistake.

No one was listening when she was at the pay-phone and hammering her lawyer, who was also her brother who despised her but was equally as greedy so when she told him, in code, there was another bag of money buried in the field, the contents of which could be his for just a modicum of help right this instant, they forged a plan. A sterling plan whereby Milo would be fingered as the architect. Helena and her brother shared some inappropriate laughter before they slammed down the receivers.

Dawn the next morning guards attacked Milo and easily discovered that oxidizing coin and pitched him into a dungeon.

Helena was sprung and inmates and guards alike wished her well. When she stepped out into freedom, had she turned her head, she might have seen a lightning bolt from a low window, from a basement grill shot a silvery beam.

Image John Martini© www.JohnMartini.com