Two men look out through the same bars; one sees mud, and one the stars.

The chipped paint on Cell Block D felt cold even through the thin prison-issued sweater. Old Man Tiber, they called him, hadn’t spoken a coherent sentence in nearly a decade, just a low, rhythmic humming that vibrated through the concrete floor. Across the narrow corridor, barely visible through the rusted bars, sat Silas Blackwood. Silas was new, barely a month in for a string of increasingly audacious art forgeries. He hadn’t yet succumbed to the grey pallor that seemed to cling to the long-term inmates like a second skin.

Today, though, something was different. Usually, Silas spent his allotted hour of yard time pacing, sketching furiously on the back of commissary receipts with a stub of pencil he’d somehow managed to conceal. Today, he was utterly still, his gaze fixed on…something. Tiber, as always, was humming, his eyes unfocused.

Warden Hayes, making his rounds, paused outside their cells. He’d seen it all in his thirty years at Blackwood Penitentiary. Despair, rage, resignation, madness. He’d learned to read the subtle shifts in posture, the flicker in the eyes that signaled a breaking point. He’d seen men crumble into nothingness, and others, inexplicably, find a strange sort of peace.

“Blackwood,” Hayes said, his voice gravelly. “Everything alright?”

Silas didn’t immediately respond. He blinked, as if surfacing from a deep dream. “Yes, Warden. Fine.” But his voice lacked its usual sharp edge. It sounded…soft.

Hayes glanced at Tiber, who hadn’t even registered his presence. “You’re not sketching?”

“Not today.” Silas’s gaze returned to the small patch of ground visible between the bars. “I was…thinking.”

Hayes snorted. Thinking was a dangerous pastime in Blackwood. “About what?”

Silas hesitated. “About perspective, I suppose.”

Hayes raised an eyebrow. “Perspective? You an architect now?”

“No, sir. Just…looking at the mud.”

Hayes followed Silas’s gaze. It was a dismal sight. A churned-up mess of dirt, rainwater, and discarded cigarette butts. A typical prison yard view. “Not much to see there.”

“Exactly,” Silas said, a strange light in his eyes. “That’s what’s interesting. Old Man Tiber, he looks out at the same thing, and he sees…well, I don’t know what he sees. But it’s clearly not mud.”

Hayes had heard the stories about Tiber. A brilliant astrophysicist, ruined by a gambling addiction and a moment of reckless fraud. He’d been on the verge of a major breakthrough, something about mapping dark matter, before it all fell apart. Now, he just hummed and stared.

“Tiber’s lost in his own world,” Hayes said dismissively. “Don’t waste your time trying to figure him out.”

But Silas was already lost in thought. “It’s the same bars, the same view. But one of us sees confinement, the other…something else. He sees beyond the walls, beyond the dirt. He sees the vastness.”

Hayes felt a prickle of unease. He’d always considered Tiber a broken man, a cautionary tale. But Silas’s words…they suggested something more. Something unsettling.

“You’re a forger, Blackwood,” Hayes reminded him. “You create illusions. Don’t start seeing illusions where there aren’t any.”

Silas didn’t reply. He simply continued to stare, his expression unreadable. Hayes moved on, checking the other cells, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d witnessed something significant.

Later that evening, a young guard, Miller, noticed Silas sketching again. But it wasn’t the meticulous reproductions of famous paintings he’d come to expect. It was a swirling, chaotic depiction of stars, nebulae, and galaxies. He’d never seen Silas draw anything like it before.

“What’s this, Blackwood?” Miller asked, cautiously.

Silas looked up, a faint smile playing on his lips. “Just trying to see things from Tiber’s perspective,” he said. “Trying to find the stars in the mud.”

The humming from Tiber’s cell continued, a constant, unwavering drone. And for the first time, Miller wondered if it wasn’t just the sound of a broken mind, but a song of something far, far away.