Summary

The first-person anonymous narrator in Michigan Reformatory’s A Ward in 2009 traded coffee for some weed. After smoking, he watched the news, and a local woman addressed the out-of-control swan population. One of the news shots broadcasted a graffitied bridge, triggering the narrator’s memories of growing up rural Illinois.

In high school, he and his friend Ricky hung out by a similar river and bridge with their older friend and drug dealer, Crash, paralyzed from the waste-down after a motorcycle accident. Following the incident, his wife Sheila cheated on him. Crash always had ideas for projects that would never come to fruition and told them of his latest endeavor: swan breeding, “because they exhibited the faithfulness and beauty he had tried and failed to find in people” (112), the narrator reasoned.

The narrator defined “the key to the beginning of the end of the...