All Gone by Stephen Dixon Page A

more than a fifty-fifty chance to survive. Even if he does she’ll still be in serious trouble, as he hasn’t got any chance of being anything but totally brain-damaged for the rest of his life.”
    â€œIf you don’t mind I’ll save what I have to say for the jury trial. Because I might be prejudicing the case if I told you all that happened to me and then because of some legal technicality she got away free,” and I hang up.

A LACK OF SPACE
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    They never let me out in the sun anymore. I don’t know why. My lawyer and I have never gotten a clear ruling on that. But when night comes and it’s dark, I’m allowed a ten-minute rest period outside. There I see the other suns—the stars. I learned that from some library books here and the newspaper articles I’ve been reading regarding this country’s space effort. The other stars are supposed to be suns, like ours, though in varying degrees of intensity depending on how big they are and how long they’ve been around. And every one of the other suns is capable of having its own solar system and our sun is only one of about one hundred billion in our galaxy and there are about five thousand galaxies in our cluster of galaxies and we’re all revolving together because we’re all held together by the force of gravitational pull each galaxy in our cluster exerts on the other, despite the fact that the closest galaxy to ours is two million light-years away from us and each light-year is approximately six trillion miles in length, and actually all of us—Earth, solar system, galaxy and cluster of galaxies—may be part of an even larger system called a cluster of clusters of galaxies, though because of limitations in astronomical equipment scientists haven’t discovered it yet. Meaning: no matter how big we think the universe is, it’s probably even bigger than that. Meaning: no matter how many billions of trillions of light-years of space we know about or can imagine going in every which direction starting from Earth, there’s probably trillions of trillions of times more space than that. So why do these prison officials have to be so petty as to deny me a relatively small sun to look at and which they know is what I like to look at and do almost most, and particularly in its setting state? And why only the night for ten minutes to see those other suns? Because I’m a condemned man, they probably reason, and they got to deny me more than the usual prison freedoms they deny the other men on death row, since I once committed that most heinous crime of all of making hay with a girl who was a minor and when she was through with me and tying her hair in back with a ribbon she said “God, if you’re not the worst lay in all these creations, then I don’t know who is,” and kept on repeating that opinion in various ways till I said lay off and she wouldn’t so I insulted her a bit and she said “Goddamn you, fag, you can’t go insulting me like that,” and still nude she grabbed a branch and came at me as if she was going to cream me with it, so I slapped it out of her hand and shoved her with my palm just to protect myself from the rock she was picking up and she fell back over her own foot and banged her head against the top of a tree stump and rolled off it onto some stones just as I leaped forward to stop her from rolling and falling, and knocked herself out and died. I knew I was in trouble and there was nothing I could do for her now, so I beat it out of there and someone found her soon after and the police came and the doctors at the hospital said she had been viciously attacked and carnally assaulted and some people in town said she was last seen riding off with me on the back of my motorcycle and I was picked up and charged with rape, murder and running away from the scene of a crime. I was jailed and written up in newspapers as a young mad killer and charged with