Summary

In the jail’s visiting area, George discovered his girlfriend, Sunshine, had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that day. George told the other four cellmates he had considered shattering the shatterproof glass to comfort her.

The anonymous first-person narrator complained about the dying TV in their ward, A North, where men and women under suicide watch were held. Although no one under suicide watch killed themselves during the narrator’s stay, someone from the jail’s general population did. The narrator’s wife had visited him on the day the dead man’s sister came for his personal effects. The narrator “played that scene over and over again” in his head: “I clutch a paper bag of their things that doesn’t seem to weigh enough” (38).

George burst into sobs in reaction to his girlfriend’s sickness: he told the others her hair was...