Monster

Steve reflects that the most opportune time to cry is at night, while the lights are out, when the sound of someone “being beaten up and screaming for help” can mask the sound of one’s own sniffling, so the others won’t know that they’re weak and try to beat them up too. Steve’s room has a mirror in it, but when he sees himself it does not look like him. Nothing in jail seems real. One lives and sleeps with strangers who don’t know each other but “still find reasons to hurt each other.”

The unreality of it all feels like a movie to Steve, but a movie with no real story, not like the prison movies he’s seen before. It’s a movie “about being alone when you’re not really alone and being scared all the time.” This gives Steve the idea of making a movie out of what he sees—not his actual life, just the feelings of prison. He will write it out in his notebook and set it up like he learned to do in school. He gives it the name that the prosecutor gave to him: Monster.