The Escape of Stephen Stephens

Some writing I did for a creative writing task in high school, years ago.

“I’m innocent.”

Stephen pressed his face against the bars, eyeing the guard that had started his stroll down the corridor. The guard ignored him. Or appeared to, anyway. Stephen reckoned he had seen a slight flair of the man’s nostrils, a idiosyncratic twitch of a facial muscle, under a layer of freckly skin and grease. The guard was a newbie, younger than Stephen given the adolescent oiliness on his brow.  Great fun, compared to the other grey haired officers, who bordered on geriatric.

“I’m innocent, I shouldn’t be here!” He let his voice slip into the scalp crawling whine it was predisposed to, a whine that almost every person he had talked to complained about. “It’s a miscarriage of justice.”

The guard passed by his cell, and Stephen lunged out, skinny arms slipping through the bars, trying to reach him. “Oi, didja hear me? I’m innoce�"” 

“F**k’s sake, Stephens, don’t try that, or you’ll break an arm.” The guard had pulled himself from Stephen’s curled fingers and had his hands of baton, incensed, but Stephen had already withdrawn his arms into the safety of his cell. “Ooh, threatening. I could report you, y’know. Prisoner abuse is a real problem.”

“Shut up.”

“You might just lose your job within a week.”

“Stephens...”

“But you still look like you live with mummy anyway.”

But the guard, despite his spotty visage and indignant eyes, was better trained than Stephen had thought. With a certain amount of effort and self-control, he turned away from his cell and continued walking, footsteps sounding heavily on the linoleum. The only satisfaction Stephen gained was from the fact that the backs of the officer’s ears were flushed red. 

Stephen faced his bleak cell with a sigh, and ended up lounging on his bed, thinking. His cellmate, who was new as well, had arrived yesterday and had not done anything but sleep in the bed opposite. But he had woken from the Stephen’s outburst and stared at him, frowning. Stephen wondered if he was impressed, standing up to the lousy guards. Maybe he could finally make a friend in this godforsaken place.

“What the hell kinda name is Stephen Stephens?”

“Aw, shut up,” Stephen groaned, mimicking the guard a few moments ago. The same damn thing, every time. “I didn’t have any choice in the matter, did I? Blame my folks.” No, forget friends. He didn’t have time to make friends. 

“You actually innocent?”

“Of course not, you dimwit. Stole over thirty cars and proud. Doesn’t matter though, I’m getting outta here.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. I’ve worked on this plan for a while, my friends on the outside are gonna drive around to where the exercise yard is, and during...”

But his cellmate had lapsed back into snores. Stephen sighed and lied down, running the plan through in his head again and again. If he imagined hard enough, the grey ceiling would sometimes flicker into a blue sky. 

***

The plan had not completely worked, but Stephen was not complaining. Climbing the rope had been harder than he had thought with his weak physique, there were cuts on his hands from the barbed wire, and he hadn’t been able to get into the sweet ol’ not-entirely-his 1973 Mustang his friends had been keeping for him. In fact, he had an inkling that his friends had been caught behind him as he had sprinted away, and the car was probably now being inspected by prison officials who would discover that license and rego were fake. But at the moment he couldn’t care less about his plan or his friends or his car; he had done it! He had escaped. 

More specifically, he had, when realising nothing had gone exactly right, ran, as fast as he could away from the compound, down some grassy embankments, through some fences he made holes through using the wire cutters his friends had thrown up to him. And now he was in the bush, still going, his legs aching, his lungs burning, the grey-green of eucalyptus enveloping his vision. He was scared to stop, what if they were right behind, catching up? He had never been very strong, but was light and usually came second or third in high school races - it had been the only HPE activity he wasn’t completely humiliated in. They couldn’t drive after him, in the thick of the trees. If he kept going, he might just outrun them. 

Despite his speed, his thoughts raced ahead of him. He realised he didn’t have the wire cutters anymore, which had been clasped in his sweaty hand. He must’ve put them down as he crawled through the last fence hole and forgotten about them. For the first time since he had donned them, he was glad for the prison garb - they were a dull khaki, and although he maintained khaki was the ugliest colour to exist, they did camouflage nicely into the bush. His shoes, on the other hand, were terrible, more like slippers. Just as he looked down to criticise them, his foot, although he wanted to blame the shoe, got caught on the uneven ground, and suddenly the leaf littered, root covered dirt rose to meet him, until all he could see was brown, then all he could see was black. 

***

There was something wrong with his right ankle. Whether it was a sprain or a break or a twist, he couldn’t tell. He could have never been the doctor his parents expected him to be, but that’s what happens when you name your son Stephen Stephens and he gets bullied out of a promising future, until the only friends he can make are the other outcasts - children of criminals, foster care kids with druggo parents. What on earth did they expect?

 “I hate you, Mum and Dad,” Stephen said absentmindedly as he fashioned a make shift splint around his ankle, out of torn strips of shirt and a stick. “F*****g all you needed to do was not name me Stephen. Literally any other name. Now look at me.” And he laughed, hoarsely.

When he had came to he was sunburnt, aching, and had no idea where he was. Now, he was still all those things plus a killer ankle he suspected he had splinted wrong as well as an extreme thirst. Things were really going his way. He stopped laughing and gazed up at the sky. Blue, crowded by tree foliage, but not by prison walls. Like he had always imagined it. He watched it a little longer as the sun sunk, the blue darkened, and his ankle throbbed sadly. 

He finally tore his eyes away and squinted at his surroundings. The lanky silhouettes of trees circled him, not unlike prison bars. Shrugging that thought aside, he crawled about until he found a suitable stick to use a crutch. He stood up, and, satisfied he was no longer being chased, gave himself some goals. 

1. Find water
2. Find highway
3. Walk along highway to nearby town
4. Somehow call friends (ones that weren’t apprehended)

He could do it. Walk until he found a creek, walk until he stumbled upon the bitumen of the road. He had to do it. What was the alternative? He didn’t want to think about it. So, first, water. 

***

But, try as he might, he couldn’t find any. He limped along through the pathless undergrowth, painstakingly slow, trying to hear the telltale trickle of a creek. His ears were instead submerged by the eerie screeches of curlews, owls, and other birds that sounded identical to human screams, by the densest cacophony of insects, invisible but mind filling, until he swore his skin was crawling with cicadas, cockroaches, and centipedes, a million legs more able than his own. 

The sun set. Occasional splashes of moonlight, leaking from above the tree tops, formed puddles on the ground. They weren’t water, but he followed them, like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of white pebbles. As a child he remembered being scared of the dark. He remembered being left home alone at night, his folks working overtime at the hospital. He would turn on every light, and then his parents would yell at him when they came home for wasting electricity. Those were the days. When he sixteen he had ran away, to stay with friends, friends with parents who may have never done a day of honest work but were still kind enough to let a stranger stay. He remembered back at that big empty house with all the lights off for the last time. It had been night. Turning to look down the street lit up by streetlights, an infinite string of them. Like the path he followed now, one light after the other. Around him, the eucalyptus trees lurked, hiding secretive creatures he couldn’t name. Stephen reckoned he was still scared of the dark. 

He came to a clearing, where a large paperbark had fallen and taken some of its neighbours along with it. He couldn’t imagine finding a place more well lit so he awkwardly lay down in the dirt. Water must wait til tomorrow. Curling up like a caterpillar, shivering in the surprising cold, he watched the sky, thick with stars, until sleep took him. 

***

But he came across no creek or lake or waterhole the next day. At midday, the air was dry and hot, the sun blistering. Every direction was the same - spindly dehydrated trees, in unexciting shades of beige and brown and eucalyptus green. Every twenty seconds, he licked his chapped lips. A small horde of flies followed him, drinking sweat he couldn’t afford to waste. Sick of the buzzing, he slapped a horsefly, then, realising how hungry he was, ate it. Then threw it up, with a mouthful of bile, at the foot of a banksia. He stumbled onwards.

*** 

The next day was the same. 

That night, he thought of the futility of his four goals. The last three didn’t matter if he died of thirst. He gulped but there was nothing to swallow. His tongue grated against the roof of his mouth like sandpaper. Now the alternative loomed. Death. He was going to die here. He wanted to sob and curse the heavens but didn’t have enough water in him. 

His regrets ran through his head. Not asking Alysha out that one time he could’ve in grade nine. Not finishing school. Stealing that stupid yellow Vauxhall Cavalier that landed him in prison. 

“I hate you, Mum and Dad.” Not saying that to his parents’ faces. They deserved to know that it was he who disowned them, not the other way around. 

In a small hollow in the dry dirt, he fell asleep and didn’t expect to wake up. 

***

But he did, to the cold of the rain falling on his face. Stephen immediately opened his mouth wide to catch the drops. They fell mercifully from the heavens above. He collected some in a hole he dug with his fingernails, and drank like an alcoholic. The water was as cloudy as the sky and tasted like dust. He didn’t complain. 

***

Later, he found a creek. It was shallow but tinkled merrily over granite rocks, into some still rock pools where he spotted small fish darting about. He had no luck catching them, but decided to never leave the water. He slept by it, but realised his mistake a few hours later when he woke to a hundred mosquitoes feeding on him, some as big as his thumbnail. The whole night, he swatted at them, then gave up and started walking again, upstream, along the creek. He couldn’t stop moving. 

***

Hunger made him hurt all over. He ate some leaves of various plants, some more insects, though he avoided flies. Nothing tasted great and he didn’t expect it to. Periodically, he went from craving Big Macs to the piss poor prison food to wanting to throw up. He trudged a dreary line down one side of the creek. Eventually, it had to reach a river or a road or something. It had to. 

***

It did. It widened, and passed by a grassy embankment. The bush had faded away. Mindlessly, he clambered over some wire fences, before realising they meant people. People, somewhere close. He looked around. Somehow, everything looked familiar. He walked up the embankment, and there it was. 

The prison. Grey and squat. Stephen stared at it endlessly. He started to limp forwards, quicker and quicker, and then his stick crutch snapped under him. So he crawled, struggling to breathe, to move, his hands stinging and possibly bleeding, covered in mosquito bites and sunburn. The building came closer. There was a guard. Stephen called out, yelled, screamed, he didn’t know what. 

“Hey, it’s Stephens. He’s come back!” The man’s voice rang a bell. Stephen looked up at his face, and found it youthful, greasy, freckly. He fell at the guard’s feet, kissed his boots, and cried.