A Morning at the Prison

Fog clung to the fences that morning, crawling low along the yard. Brewer walked the perimeter with his collar turned up, hands ungloved, moving with his usual calm but quieter now, as though conserving breath without admitting it. His exhale left ghosts on the air.

Inside the administration wing of the penitentiary, the smell of floor polish and damp wool drifted through the halls. He leaned once against the radiator while checking a report—the heat pushing through his coat like a fever—waiting for the light in his head to steady. The men saw it before he spoke. One offered him a cigarette at noon, the pack held out in silence. Brewer shook his head.

“Trying to quit,” he said, though the truth was simpler: the breath he had could no longer spare the smoke.

Excerpt from Three Generations

The Return of Paul Head

They brought Paul home on a Tuesday afternoon and left him sitting on the front steps with a note from the Veterans Administration and a small duffel bag. No salute, no handshake, no officer to walk him inside. Just a car door slamming, gravel stirring, and the shape of her son—grown taller, leaner, older—sitting on her porch like someone who had forgotten the way in.

He sat with his hands dangling between his knees, fingers tapping, tapping, tapping, as if marking a cadence only he knew. His boots were dusty, the laces tied too tight, the leather cracked. His skin looked pale under the hard Georgia sun, almost blue at the edges.

The paper in his hand was creased, the ink already fading.

United States Veterans Administration Atlanta Regional Office June 3, 1953 Private First Class Paul B. Head, Serial No. 34-187-942, has been discharged from active duty and placed under medical observation. Diagnosis: Combat Fatigue (Neuropsychiatric). Status: Unfit for further service. Patient advised to rest. Family instructed to provide quiet and stable environment. Respectfully, Lt. H. R. Matthews, M.D., Medical Corps.

Alma folded the document once and slipped it into her apron pocket. She opened the screen door, its hinge crying softly.

“Paul,” she said. He nodded, but his eyes didn’t lift.

His hair was slicked back, too precise, the shine too bright—as if he had combed it four or five times to make sure every strand obeyed him.

His face was leaner than she remembered, drawn and hollow beneath a sheen of sweat. He smelled of cigarettes, metal, cold rain, and something she could only name as war.

“Come on in,” she said. He rose slowly, as though waiting for an order that did not come, and stepped inside. His shoulders twitched once, like a man ducking from an invisible blow.

He glanced around the small house—table, stove, the narrow hallway—seeing it all and seeing none of it. His hand brushed the wall, fingertips searching the wood grain as though checking its solidity.

Excerpt from Three Generations