The story
The air inside that penitentiary always held a peculiar weight, a mix of stale humidity, cheap disinfectant, and an exhaustion that seemed to seep from the very floor tiles. Helena, who had spent several years teaching literature workshops to the inmates, crossed security with her usual resignation. However, that morning she was accompanied by Amalia, a reserved woman whose intuition and strange sensitivity allowed her to notice shadows where others only saw empty corners.
As they crossed the final security checkpoint, the body scanner let out a sharp, persistent screech. The guard on duty frowned, rapped his knuckles against the monitor screen, and checked the scanner's empty tunnel. There was no one standing in front of the beam of light, no metal, and no suspicious lump on the conveyor belt, but the device insisted on signaling a dense presence. It was right at that moment that Helena felt a freezing gust travel down the back of her neck, as if an invisible door had swung wide open right behind them both.
"Don't turn around in a rush," Amalia whispered in her ear, gently grabbing her forearm. "Someone just walked through with us. They're glued to your side."
They walked down the corridor of the old cell block, flanked by chipped metal bars and floors that the gloom slowly swallowed up. With every step, Helena’s skin prickled more; the cold wasn't coming from the air around them, but seemed to be born from the center of her own bones. Suddenly, a harsh, piercing smell of cheap tobacco filled the hallway, a dry, thick smoke impossible to justify in an area where smoking had been strictly banned for years.
Helena instantly recognized the scent and the unease of the place. A few yards away sat a sealed-off cell, famous among the guard staff for a tragedy no one dared to speak of once evening fell. Years before, a newly arrived kid, consumed by anguish and an insatiable cigarette habit, had decided to end his life during a freezing dawn. His cellmate, a deaf-mute man, witnessed the horror amid absolute powerlessness: with no voice to alert the prison, he beat against the bars with a pewter spoon until the skin peeled off his hands, but the guards arrived far too late.
"It's him," Amalia murmured, fixing her eyes on the gloom of the abandoned cell. "He hasn't left. Listen to him cry."
Helena stayed quiet. In the dull echo of the hallway, beneath the distant rumble from the other yards, a muffled, childish, and desperate sob vibrated. Amalia stopped right before the airlock connecting to the outside exit and shook her head, infinite compassion reflected in her eyes.
"He's looking for a way out, but he can't cross the walls. He walks through the cell blocks looking for someone to hear him, to pray for him, or to show him the light, but this place swallows everything up."
The cold slowly began to retreat, crawling back toward the disused cell alongside the smell of stale ash. As the iron bars clicked shut behind them with a final metallic snap, Helena understood the true cruelty of those walls: there are sentences that don't end with death, but remain suspended forever in the complicit silence of the concrete.
