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Not me

Soon he would be listening for the tap-tap of heels heading his way

The puffing of the burly guards holding the shiny shackles

The soleet his name the next day

The piousaloud his verses because you were supposed to have so to on your way out of here Not out of prison Out of life

Texas executed more inmates than any other state, over five hundred in just the last thirty years For nearly a century, starting in 1819, they did it by hanging Then they used the electric chair called “Old Sparky,” and three hundred and sixty-one inmates had been put to death by electrocution over four decades Now Texas used lethal injection to send you off to the hereafter

Either way you were still dead

By law executions could not begin before 6 pht Well, nothing like dragging this out, he thought Made for a really long and really shitty day

Walking Dead Man, he’d been called

“Good riddance,” he’d heard uards

He didn’t want to look back Not to the epicenter of this whole thing

But really, how could he not?

So as the final moment neared, he started to think of them

The murders of Roy and Lucinda Mars, his white father and black mother

Back then that combination had been weird, different, exotic even, certainly in West Texas Noas co in now looked like bits and pieces of fifty different types of humanity

One recently incarcerated punk was the product of biracial parents, who in turn were also the children of nontraditional pairings So the new kid—an idiot who’d bloay a store clerk over a shoplifted bag of Twizzlers—was a mishmash of black, brown, and white, with a dash of Chinese thrown in And he was also a Musliet on his knees and pray five times a day, as soinally from Colorado

And he had started telling people he really wanted to become Alexis

Mars sat up on the bunk in his cell and looked at his watch It was ti The last time he would ever do this, in fact

His jumpsuit hite, and on the back were the letters D and R printed in black They stood for “death row” Mars had equated it to a snake’s rattle, warning folks to stay the hell away

He dropped to the coolness of the concrete floor and did two hundred push-ups, first on fists and then on fingertips, and finally fro the crown of his bald head on the concrete with each pass Next he perfor up with every rep—depth charges, he called thee of motion, and, most important, flexibility He could touch his toes to his forehead with his legs ra, ropy-muscled man

Then came the thousand stomach and core reps that seared his abs like acid It was the reason he had rock-hard obliques, and an eight-pack, his belly button stretched so tight it looked more like a mole than where his umbilical cord had once attached Next came flat-out plyomania where he pushed off all four walls and the floor in a series of

He was like Spider-Man, or Fred Astaire dancing on ceilings He had a lot of hours to plan such things in prison His life was very structured, but it also offered up a load of free ti There were no classes, no rehabilitation of any kind