You Have Your Marching Orders

Eric Boyd
8 min readJan 29, 2020
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

“I heard you got in a fight,” my cellie, Mickey, said.

Hands behind my head on the top bunk, I said, “It wasn’t a big deal.” Me and another dumb kid had a two minute fight in his cell. We grappled for a moment before he wrapped me up, switching off free hands to swipe at me, landing one on my chin; I slammed him into the wall with my back until he fell onto the bottom bunk. I threw rabbit punches into the back…

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Eric Boyd

Work in Joyland, Guernica, and The Offing. Winner of a PEN Prison Writing Award. Working on a novel. // linktr.ee/ericboyd