Inmate 1577

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Henry sat deathly still in the corner watching the life drain from his mother’s body, knees drawn tight against his chest, arms wrapped around his shins. He stared at the blood seeping from her pulpy head wounds, poking forth from between strands of matted hair.

The seven-year-old boy had told the policeman in so many words about the man in the black knit mask who came up from behind and struck his mother several times, then disappeared out the back door. Afterwards, Henry had sat frozen, unable to move, unable to comfort her in her last seconds before her body stilled, her eyes rapt in death.

A bottle of maple syrup, the lone weapon his mother had grabbed to fight off her attacker, lay shattered on the floor, oozing across the kitchen linoleum. In halting sentences, with shock-laden tear-filled eyes, Henry described how the masked man had knocked it from her hand before she could raise it.

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