Excerpt from Sing Soft, Sing Loud:

"...after cleanup I go on up to the second tier and look out the window for a while. It's a lousy window as windows go, no more than a foot and a half wide and maybe two feet high, and it's set in the wall near the ceiling, too high to see anything through and too small to let much light in, but it's the only window in the tank and at least it's a window. Over in A tank there's no window at all. I wonder sometimes why they put one in this tank and not in the other. This one don't even have any bars cuz it's twenty feet off the floor and the only way to get out of it is to fly.

"I hang over the rail on the ramp of the second tier and try to figure out ways you could get out that winow. I think maybe they put it there just to make us miserable. It's like a flag of the Free World, a little brilliant blue patch of sky and sun to make sure you don't forget what you're missing. We don't ever get no sun around here. I'm fair-skinned to begin with, and after I been here a month my legs look like fish bellies. But every morning for just about a half hour there's a little patch of sun comes through that window and hits the second tier, and I go sit in it when I can. There's a palm tree growing outside the building, and if you get in just the right place on the ramp you can see the tips of its branches through the window. When it's windy the branches sway back and forth and because they're something slive and swinging they make me feel good. If the screws knew about that tree they would surely have it cut down, so I never open my mouth about it."

Coming soon -- a complete chapter from Sing Soft, Sing Loud.

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