A man named Fisher

An ant has no warning of impending doom from a descending foot, not because the signs are not readily evident but because the ant's mental processes are not configured to interpret them. Such was the unavoidable oblivion of Jacob Fisher to his immediate future. Only God could have predicted the outcome, but to God it was so obvious that a prediction was laughably meaningless.

Jacob Fisher's hands swung freely as he walked down the narrow corridor from his cell, preceded by the uniformed officer. They stopped swinging momentarily as he waited for a door to be opened, and then jammed themselves into fists in his pockets as he entered the divided room. Between prisoner and civilian, between crime and victim, between just and unjust was erected a barrier. Glass partitions permeated by telephone wires, a glimpse of freedom that made Fisher more aware of which side he was not on. A brief breath from the outside world that only emphasized the ensuing lonely silence.

On the other side of the glass partition sat his father. Oliver Fisher was taller than his son by nearly a foot, but stooped his thin frame into the seat provided with characteristic ill posture and humility. His grey eyes penetrated the glare on the glass, at first the only feature Jacob could make out. Then his father leaned closer and his face came into focus, concentrated in an intense gaze that lit up the inside of Jacob's mind like skyscraper lights at twighlight. Jacob felt memories reviving, stretching out to connect to new thoughts that Jacob didn't know he had been thinking, but now realized had been sustaining his hope all along.

He picked up the phone, breathless to hear his father's first words.

"Jacob you are better than this. Better than they are letting you believe. Better than you are believing yourself. You have no excuse to sit behind that wall and look at me like there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to learn to be more careful."

Jacob's eyes flared with surprise, anger, and then excitement. He gripped the phone by the mouthpiece and stared fixedly at a point on the glass in front of him. He swung the earpiece of the phone, gently tapping the spot on the window directly in front of his father's face. He saw his father break into a smile.

Jacob kept tapping on the glass, an insistent rhythm but not loud enough to draw the notice of the guards. As he tapped, he began to smile, a smile like his father's, but the rest of his face creased with concentration.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Click. Click. Click. Crack. Crack. Crack.

As he tapped, he changed nothing about the way he swung the phone, but something doubled, tripled, quadrupled the force of the phone against the glass. A gentle swing now yielded a crunch as powdered glass drifted down his side of the window. Lightning-trail fissures branched and split, now reaching to the edge of the window, widening with each tap almost as if being hit with a sledgehammer.

Tap. Click. Crack. CRASH

With the hidden power, the unnoticed sound of a crushing waterfall, the entire window dropped in cracked pieces onto the table. A guard heard the clatter of a million misshapen beads and came to investigate. He saw Jacob rise from his chair and drop the phone casually into a sea of broken glass. Taking his father's hand, Jacob stepped into the crunching aftermath and down again on the other side. With a deceptively slow, measured tread they escaped the shouts and shots of the guard and proceeded with purpose for the door.

It wasn't that Jacob didn't know what he had done. He just didn't know to whom he had done it.