by Michael J Moore
In December of 2014, I sat in the living room of a coworker’s condo, eating pizza and scrolling through the contacts in my cellphone, while another loaded magazines with nine-millimeter rounds and stuffed them into black semi-automatics. Clearly, our common job wasn’t one for which we would declare taxes. Finding the contact I needed, I rang my daughter’s mother and asked what my daughter wanted for Christmas. The answer: anything to do with a TV show she liked, called, “Paw Patrol.” A few days later, I was arrested at gunpoint by a tactical team consisting of officers from three police departments and was charged with seven felonies related to a string of armed robberies that spanned two counties. When I asked my public defender if I might qualify for some sort of sentencing alternative, he replied, “Michael, those are for drug-addicts and the mentally ill. No judge is going to believe you’re either of those things. You’re just a guy who had financial problems because of child-support payments, and started robbing people.”
I plead guilty to three of the counts, and though I received a twelve-year prison-sentence, I also unearthed a calling I had always suspected was there, yet never explored. I wrote my first novel with a golf pencil and a few tablets of legal paper in Downtown Seattle’s King County Jail. The manuscript was passed from cell to cell, and my neighbors’ reactions, combined with the joy I found in the process of creating, left little doubt in my mind that fiction writing and I were meant for each other.
A few years later, while working on my latest horror novel titled Cinema Seven, and after a slew of published short stories and novels, I sat on my bunk in the Monroe Correctional Complex (MCC) watching the world news as COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. Soon, the virus tore through a nursing home in Kirkland, less than an hour away, leaving death in its wake at a rate that dropped the jaws of all my neighbors and me. At the time, we were quarantined in six-by-nine-foot prison-cells because MCC had become the first Department of Corrections (DOC) facility in the state to have confirmed cases among the incarcerated. The death-tolls around the world crescendoed in lock step. It was as if the DOC collaborated with the coronavirus in an attempt to bring on us the same fate that had been dealt in Kirkland, and as a matter of life or death, my plans had to change.
Visitation and all programming were canceled. Each living-unit housed roughly 200 residents in tiny cells with poor ventilation and bars, rather than doors, which meant we were all breathing the same recycled air. We had all watched the seasonal flu spread rapidly every year in our home due to these conditions. Though DOC administrators had provided facemasks to the guards, with the option of wearing them at work, most were refusing despite being the only people coming in and out of the facility. Some of my neighbors attempted to downplay the pandemic by asserting that it was a hoax, or the product of governmental fear-mongering, but it was clear they were only trying to convince themselves. We were all afraid, but I was an author with a platform. So one afternoon, I turned off the news and wrote about what was happening in my home. The article was accepted, and swiftly published by a literary journal in Chicago.
Once the quarantine ended, restrictions were implemented that confined the population to areas where we were crowded together, making it nearly impossible to socially distance. The outbreak amongst the incarcerated continued to spread, and there was a tension in the air that finally snapped on April 8th, when MCC became the first prison in the country to have an uprising because of staff negligence in regards to their handling of the coronavirus. The incident gained national attention, but the narrative being spun in the media painted incarcerated protesters as violent rioters. So once again, I wielded my pen and set the record straight in an article which was published by HuffPost. Guards were mandated to wear masks, and I continued writing articles about toxic staff culture and corruption in my home. This publicized my incarcerated status and I subsequently lost a book deal because of it. But COVID-19 has taught me that if oppressed people don’t use every tool at their disposal to take a stand, the consequences can be deadly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael J Moore is a Latinx author and playwright from Washington state. His books include Highway Twenty, which appeared on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award, the bestselling post-apocalyptic novel, After the Change, which is used as curriculum at the University of Washington, and the psychological thriller, Secret Harbor. His work has received awards, has appeared in various anthologies, journals, newspapers (including HuffPost) and magazines, on television and has been adapted for theater. Follow him at twitter.com/MichaelJMoore20 or instagram.com/michaeljmoorewriting.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ishaq Adekunle is a Writer and photographer who lives in the outskirt of Ibadan, Nigeria.
He is trying to learn about the state of well being and reasoning among the African children and to lend a louder voice.
To this effect, he has learnt to tell their stories in his poetries and photographs which some has appeared on EyeEm photography NYC, New Creatives Horizon, GetlitNaija, and elsewhere. You can contact Ishaq Adekunle on +2348137396919 or reach him on Twitter.
ABOUT THIS PHOTOGRAPH
In picture : Fareed Usman
Photo Title : “Speak to The Bars”
Location : Odo-ona Elewe,Tipper Garage, Challenge, Ibadan.
Date of creation : 11th July, 2020.
This Digital art expresses the tiredness of the Boy child voice being smothered in the raucous din of groups and crowds that madly shout their secrets and forget their own children, making it impossible for them to communicate their fears, their voice inaudible thus governing them into an introverted life and distabilize their confidence in speech while they grow.