I dreamt the prison was a library

I was walking through rows of silent shelves, each one labelled with a name I knew—some from my shift, others from years before. The books weren’t bound in leather or paper, but in skin, stitched with thread that looked like old prison wire. I opened one and found my own handwriting, not from a report, but from a letter I never sent to a man who died quietly in cell 14. The air smelled like cold steel and wet concrete, but also like cinnamon—something I haven’t smelled since the kitchen fire in ’09. I didn’t feel guilty. Just… watched. And then I realised: the librarian wasn’t me. It was him.