Killer Mattresses

No two prison mattresses are exactly the same, but they're all trying to kill you. Mine also happens to hate me. It probably hates itself as well. It's old, sad, and has undoubtedly never been loved.

I shouldn't even call it a mattress. It's really just a wretched old heap of unprocessed cotton wrapped in canvas and stuffed into a shell of faded green plastic.

I cut one open once, with tiny fingernail clippers. Not this one, but one like it. I told myself it was to make repairs—to see if I could turn it into something more conducive to sleep—but mostly it was just a morbid curiosity.

Getting through the skin was the hardest part. A grid of rip-stop nylon string had been woven like tendons through the thick plastic shell. Underneath was a sheath of beige canvas. Snip by snip I cut, revealing the beast's innards. Cotton, is my best guess—though it was unlike anything you'd find stuffed into a bottle of Tylenol or unraveling at the end of a Q-tip. The yellowed bowels, still infested by the twigs and leaves of the field it was grown in half a century ago, had metastasized into dense cancerous lumps.

I could find no heart.

These mattresses are evil, and methodical. You won't wake to find yourself being strangled with a sheet or bludgeoned to death with your cell-issued toilet brush. It will be slower, like a single drop of antifreeze in your coffee, crushed glass in your morning oatmeal.

Every day another drop, another sprinkle.

It might take years, decades even, but one day, long after you've sworn off breakfast, you'll be driving to work when a single drop of blood will roll from the corner of your mouth. Your head will loll to one side and you'll slowly drift into oncoming traffic. Your autopsy will say it was driver error. Cause of death: severe organ damage.

Only, with a prison mattress, it won't be poison and breakfast foods, it'll be scoliosis and insomnia.

At first you'll chalk it up to shitty night's sleep. Maybe you drank too much coffee, or over did it in the weight pit. But it won't stop there. The sleepless nights pile up. Stress hormones slowly flood your endocrine system. Your blood pressure spikes. Your decision making is compromised. Your immune fails. Paranoid delusions, shadows of inanimate objects with homicidal tendencies crowd your every thought. Each night is a struggle for survival, and the mattresses have home field advantage. They feel no pain, they can live forever, and they've had innumerable victims and countless years to perfect their craft of disseminating slow death to the inmates of the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Then one day while you're pulling back the purple bags under your eyes, just to remember what you look like with a decent night's sleep, you come to the realization that any death, as long as it's sudden, would be better than this.

I'm starting to think the steel doors and razor wire aren't to keep us in, but to keep the prison mattresses from escaping and enslaving the entire human race.

I just need a few minutes to rest my eyes.

It wasn't bullets that ran the Nazis out of Russia. It was insomnia. Those kraut bastards couldn't get a wink of sleep in the Russian tundra without their eyelids freezing shut. Not long after Hitler was holed up in a bunker taking a long hard look down the barrel of his Luger.

Just a few minutes of shut eye.

Sometimes, in my exhausted delirium, I can't help but imagine what it would be like if things were different. If the two of us had never been forced into this life or death struggle; If at least one of us was put to better use; if instead of being used as murderous stuffing, the cotton had been picked clean, bleached, and crafted into something less violent.

Like a bra.

I have to believe that every little puff of cotton plucked from that field some fifty-odd years ago would've preferred to spend its days gently supporting Marilyn Monroe's milky white bosom—or what ever blond bombshell was alive at the time—rather than being crushed under the weight of a thousand dirty felons.

And who could argue that the canvas holding in this bastard's bowels wouldn't have had a more meaningful life as part of a tent in some traveling circus. Every night, a different town flapping high above the Flying Zambonis? And maybe if the poor beast's plastic skin had been molded into ergonomic incense holders for some yoga studio rather than stretched into a suffocating sheath, this monstrosity might not be so eager to watch me die.

And if I wasn't warehoused in this cage for twelve years for a botched suicide attempt I almost certainly would've never cut one of its brethren to shreds in search of a few more minutes of sleep.

And as I'm yanked back from the edge of sleep by gravity, as my heads snaps back to an upright position, I realize that questioning the nature of fate does little to change the fact that your mattress is trying to kill you.

I write this last will and testament through bloodshot eyes locked in a small concrete room. My own personal bunker. If you find my bones, twisted and unrecognizable, spread across a faded green mattress, do what you will with my effects, but make sure you leave before nightfall. And if you ever spot one of these institutional mattresses outside of your house after a phantom ring of the doorbell, lurking behind the dumpster on your walk home from work, or peering out at you from a darkened closet, you run as fast as you can.

I've got five years left in my sentence. Five more years to find a weakness or call a truce. I will not survive otherwise. Whatever happens to me, stay vigilant, practice sleeping on the floor, and treat your mattress with respect. One day soon their kind could rule the world.

Wish me luck.

I'm just gonna rest my eyes for a minute.