Summary

An inmate told the anonymous first-person narrator he had once witnessed a bird’s feet bleed from landing on razor wire, which the narrator likened to “Slinkys for masochistic giants that sit atop every fence” (161). The prison fence wire was also dubbed “concertina” (161). The narrator rejected the claim, as he had had seen birds land on the wire before.

The narrator recalled a man who attempted to escape through the fence and the “constant red trail across the white sidewalk, as if marking the way back home in some dark fairy tale” (162) when the guards brought him back. The longer men remain incarcerated, the more they believe they could escape through the fence.

A goose from a gaggle that would congregate nearby flew “from the outside in” (162), snagging and wounding itself on the wire and, ultimately, dying. Now, the other geese “talk quietly...