Not the most eventful of days, though I did cobble together this at my weekly writing group, based on a pair of picture prompts:
They called him the Frogman of Alcatraz, and although he was often tempted to correct them — it had been Pierpont Correctional, off the coast of mainland Florida, and the gear he’d kludged together to escape could hardly be called proper scuba equipment, had conked out less than ten miles down-river — Gilbert usually kept silent. Word was, he was biding his time until parole, and didn’t want the board or the warden catching wind that he was bragging about his early days behind bars. Or that he’d actually learned some kind of lesson — was, against all odds, that rarest of things, a reformed man — and didn’t want to give any of the younger cons any ideas.
And, of course, there was some truth to that; it could be another ten to fifteen years before they saw fit to release him, and Rockbrook wasn’t the kind of open-door that Pierpont had been — any ideas the young guys might take from his story would be tough to act upon here, in these landlocked Virginia hills — but Gilbert wasn’t looking to be the inspirational story for anybody’s daring escape. He was just biding his time, what was left of it, and he didn’t need to be anybody’s role model. But the real truth ran deeper, back all the way to those winding, dark rivers feeding out into the ocean or the Gulf Coast or — god, he really hadn’t thought that plan all the way through, had he? What would he have done if they hadn’t found him, if he’d been swept out to sea instead of being caught in the prison boat’s search lights? He couldn’t even have drawn a convincing map of Florida, much less navigated it. It was probably good that he’d been turned around, pushed back first by the current, then the darkness, and then finally by the real reason Gilbert didn’t talk about those days or correct the young guys when they spilled what little they’d heard of his story.
The real reason Gilbert didn’t say anything was because he knew it was crazy, and he knew he still believed it, and god only knew what the guys — or the guards, or the warden, or the parole board — would say if they knew about that. When they called him the Frogman of Alcatraz, even though it didn’t make sense and made a mess of his real story, Gilbert just smiled, said nothing, kept scrubbing potatoes or stocking shelves in the prison library or whatever work detail he’d been given that week. Gilbert didn’t say anything, because on that night he’d tried escaping from Pierpont, when he’d made it just a few miles off shore in that patchwork dive suit he’d stitched together — the one all the papers marveled at afterward, despite its never working properly, almost getting Gilbert killed all by itself, hoses snapping left and right — that was the night that Gilbert met the talking frog.
