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    Out of the Cage
    Out of the Cage
    Out of the Cage
    Ebook48 pages44 minutes

    Out of the Cage

    By James Dargan

    ()

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    About this ebook

    De Lacy has just got out of prison. His crime is a dark secret he wishes to keep that way. Alone, he must find himself again in the world - a world where he used to be someone respected. Now he is little more than a human stain, existing because that's what one does when one's alive. A black comedy/mystery story which mockingly describes the little man's fight against the rest of the world.

    Out of the Cage is a 12,000-word short story.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDanny Boy Books
    Release dateSep 2, 2013
    ISBN9781497708129
    Out of the Cage
    Author

    James Dargan

    James Dargan was born in Birmingham, England, in 1974. Coming from an Irish background, he frequently writes about that experience. As well as England, he has also lived in the United States, Ireland, and - for the best part of fifteen years - in Warsaw, Poland, his home from home from home.

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      Book preview

      Out of the Cage - James Dargan

      ONE

      I got a little money from them and that was it. I knew it wouldn’t be enough and I knew if I wanted to eat and live like a normal person of sorts I would have to get more money. The only way I knew that was possible was by getting a job in some place, doing something – what that was yet I did not know. I believed wholeheartedly my criminal record would go some way – most of the way, in fact – of curtailing any pretensions I had of loftiness in the professions or something where I needed a brain. My former job as a teacher was closed to me. I would have to set my sights much lower now, so low I would be a miner or a deep-sea diver in a positional sense on the ladder vocational rankings: a cleaner or a dishwasher, perhaps. Maybe a cashier in a supermarket. We would have to see on that account.

      I only had on my scrawny person the clothes on my back and a small, brown leather bag with a few additionals I had had on me before I entered the prison all those years before. The first few minutes I found it hard outside the prison encased in free air and surrounded by surroundings that were very different from what I had got used to in my cell and in the small exercise yard I had paced for many years in such a repetitive manner the concrete had been etched inexorably with the mark of my footsteps. My shirt and trousers were way too big for me. In my pocket, next to the money they had given me, I had the address to a halfway house for former prisoners. I was supposed to go there, to stay as it were until I could get on my feet, and find myself something more comfortable and to my own individual needs and tastes. The halfway house was a long way from the prison, so it was a good walk all in all, and much more than I had walked in the little exercise yard in the prison all alone, which had been only ten minutes a day, so it was hard going really.

      The halfway house - when I eventually got there - was on the exterior quite ugly with cracking plaster and dirty walls – built for ugly people, I supposed, which prisoners were, in a moral sense at least. I walked through the door and into the reception area. An old man with a fine head of thick dark hair was sitting behind the desk, watching something or other on television.

      What do you want? he said, looking at me.

      I gave him my name and told him I was from the prison and that my counsellor had sent me. He opened and began to look through a thick leather-bound book beside him which I could only gather was a log of all the residents past, present and future.

      Mr De Lacy, he began, before closing the book again,  room seven... It’s up the stairs on the right-hand side. He handed me the key.

      Thank you, I said, before going up the stairs to my room. I opened the door and walked in. It was a very sparse room, much like the cell in which I had spent so much of my time, but without the toilet. There was a bed, a writing desk, a side drawer with a lamp on it and that was about it as far as the furniture went. I was not even afforded the pleasure of a picture or two on the walls, which would

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