Excerpt: This Game of Pick-Up Sticks

I am locked in a Prison.
I am being led by the hand into a brightly lit white room. The curtains are wide open, the windows shut. There are not bars on the windows, but I know that the alarm will go off if someone so much as touches them. The white room is decorated with a wooden coffee table and several lime green sofas. They look so soft; as if you would sink right into one and disappear within its folds. I would like to test this theory sometime, maybe even right now or as soon as I am alone. Snow falls silently outside, and I feel the strong urge to run outside this instant to jump in it but of course I resist.
I would not want them to think I was crazy.
The person who led me into this room is a middle aged woman named Gloria. She is shorter than me, and I can tell that she isn’t exactly thrilled to be here with me either. Her hair is strawberry and she is smiling as she shows me around the mental institution.
“This is the common room,” Gloria says, gesturing around the room as if that is supposed to mean something to me. I take in the rest of the setting; board games stacked underneath the coffee table, a bookcase full of old looking volumes, and security cameras in every corner. “You will probably be spending most of your time in here when you are not in therapy, dinning room, or when you are sleeping in your bedroom. Quiet time in your rooms begins at 9:30, and lights out is at 10:30.”
Apparently I am a seven year old again.
“Now, I need to go, but I will bring you to your room and let you unpack. You can meet the other boys at dinner in a couple hours. A nurse will come to bring you down or your roommate will come to show you there,” she says, still holding my hand. She begins to usher me out of the common room and presumably towards my bedroom.
Home sweet home.