catapult magazine

The end of the tunnel

by Dayton Castleman

Yet finally, as if by some mysterious, graceful calling, the pipes emerge together at the base of the thirty-five-foot, stone wall and rise in one impossible vertical thrust, up and over. Framed by the end of cellblock four, they resemble a choir of organ pipes, reintroducing a colorful, transcendent music into the cold, quiet cathedral of prisoners. The implied connection with the other pipes offers no hint as to how they have traveled to this point, how they converge beneath the ground or how they manage to scale the impossible wall.