BLOOD WAS EVERY COLOR
by Andrew Patrick
When Joe saw the sun for the first time in a long time it blinded his eyes. There was no
ceremony to it. The bulls just got him out of his hole and walked him past the work rooms with the
dripping pipes and past the boiler rooms where the men could not sweat enough to get the black off of
them and past the iron door where the women were quartered. The bulls were oddly gentle - Joe
didn't feel a cattle prod or even a rough hand the whole time - and that made him nervous.
A few months back, he had seen a man - Old Ephraim, the shits had called him, though that
wasn't his real name - taken out to be executed. When they executed you, they took you out into the
light, or so the old shits said. All Joe knew was that when he saw the bulls take Old Ephraim, they were
kind, almost mannerly. Joe decided that meant something. If the bulls had it in them to let a man have
a tiny shred of dignity before he was shot for reasons unknown to anyone, then that meant they were
cruel as a matter of policy, and not because they especially enjoyed it. Sure, some of them might, and
there had to be a tiny element of sadism in all of them, or else they couldn't do it, but for most of
them, it was the job they did, and intimidation and hair triggers made the doing easier. But that wasn't
all. There was something human in them as well. That was nice to know.
But it did little to decrease his fear. The lack of pain, the lack of taunts, all that fed the idea that
he was going to be taken above and shot in the back of the head. He'd heard that was how it was done:
small caliber load right into the spot where the skull and brain converged. He got that from Dev, who
worked on the burial detail, who smoked cigarettes with guards sometimes, so Joe took him seriously.
They had quiet conversations during stretch breaks over small smashed butts of tobacco, and they
shared what they knew. It was what all the shits did.