Soul Murder. Daniel Blake

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       1:25 p.m.

      When Jesslyn pulled in at the truck stop just outside DuBois on I-80, she realized with a start that she could hardly remember a thing about the last hour or so she’d been driving. She’d been operating the car on instinct and muscle memory alone, while her thoughts chased themselves into rolling, tumbling tendrils of confusion.

      Her career was over. That much – that alone – she knew. She believed in punishment, and retribution; that was why she’d sought a vocation in corrections. Taking that from her, and in a way which meant she’d never find work in that sector again, was more than she could bear. It was as though Mara Slinger had first led her into evil, then cut her heart out. Here, truly, was the devil.

      She wondered whether she should buy a razor here, open the arteries in her wrists, and be done with it all; and even as the thought came to her, she stamped on it with frantic fury, as though trying to beat down a grass fire.

      Just the fact that she could entertain such a notion was a deep, shaming sin; 1 Corinthians 3: 16 said: ‘Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.’

      She’d preached that passage repeatedly in the Muncy chapel, knowing that barely a week went past without an inmate trying to take her own life.

      Jesslyn stopped her car, a silver Toyota Camry she’d had for a few years, and walked across the parking lot to the restaurant building.

      She hadn’t eaten all day. She’d been too nervous to eat breakfast this morning, knowing that today her fate would be decided one way or another, and afterwards she’d been given half an hour to pack up all her belongings, hand in her credentials, and get out. No time to say her goodbyes, let alone get some food.

      Twenty years’ hard work, ripped from her in a flash.

      The burger bar smelt like all burger bars do; of cooking oil, sweat and resentment.

      Jesslyn walked up to the counter, where a Hispanic-looking woman whose nameplate read ‘Esmerelda’, and who was too young to be as overweight as she was, regarded the world without enthusiasm.

      ‘Help you?’ Esmerelda asked, her tone so polite as to be insolent.

      Jesslyn mumbled her order and dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

      Fat fingers handed her change and food oozing grease through its wrappers.

      Jesslyn went to the far corner of the room, past an EMPLOYEES WANTED sign and a couple of truckers with baseball caps trailing raggedy ponytails.

      She was halfway through her burger when the tears came, hot with anger and self-pity. She pressed her hands to her face, not to staunch the flood but in the illogical, childish belief that if she couldn’t see the other diners, they couldn’t see her.

      Through the hot rising of mucus in her throat, she repeated silently to herself the words of Lamentations 2: 18. ‘Their heart cried out to the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night; give thyself no rest, nor let the apple of thine eye cease.’