Text by Mcgettigan

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Two men sit in a cell near the desert’s edge. 

They don’t talk. 

The man on the bottom bunk wonders if the man on the top is awake. 

He is. 

Without knowing it, they stare at the same spot on the wall, where the paint chips away into the sink. 

They don’t talk.

They haven’t ever really. But after so much time, each thinks of the other as family, though they’ve never said it. 

It’s not remorse or regret that fills them. It’s a different kind of sadness. A kind only men like them know. 

They watched the paint crack and shed onto their toothbrushes and the comb they shared. 

And though they didn’t talk, in that moment both men did as so many others had already done, and quietly gave up on themselves.