For most of the period I now call “lockdown,” I’d get weekly calls, not from my brother, exactly, but from an automated voice representing Securus, the communications technology firm his prison had contracted with. He’d been in on this charge for five years, transferred from the county jail just weeks before our mother’s funeral — recently enough that he was denied furlough, so he attended the service as a voice, his grief so heavy it gave a body to his absence as the AV tech held my sister’s phone up to a microphone to play a recording over the sanctuary speakers. A rough, oddly intimate distance.
I remember him always being gone somewhere. I remember him woven in static.
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