These walls
Old Max went up in 1871, before Colorado was even a state. Prisoners cut the stone out of the hill behind it and stacked their own cells. Forty-two of them. Four years later they built the wall, because men kept walking off.
In 1889 the state moved its killing inside these walls, out of public view. First a gallows that jerked a man up instead of dropping him. Then in 1934 the gas chamber, second state in the country to try it. The warden built the first one with three chairs so he could do three at once. The last man sat in that chair in 1967. On the tier, that chair is Old Sparky. It sits in the prison museum next door now, beside the electric shock machine they used to control the problem prisoners.
Stone holds the cold. The windows sit so deep that daylight barely crawls down to the lower tiers, and the gray shadow never leaves the bunks.
Nineteen-eighty-seven. Cañon City, Colorado. Old fucking Max.
Home of Old Sparky. Yeah, the chair. Yeah. That one.
The sally port closes with a metal cough and a full-body clang.
They strip you. Delouse you. Shave you down to the stubble.
No more crosses. No more "Live, Love, Learn" bullshit.
Just stone, steel, and honesty.
They stamp the paper and speak my new name: 62927.