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Part One

SHADOWS

CHAPTER ONE

The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgment

—The American Joe Miller’s Jest Book

Shadow had done three years in prison He was big enough and looked don’t-fuck-with- tiht hiht a lot about how much he loved his wife

The best thing—in Shadow’s opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief The feeling that he’d plunged as low as he could plunge and he’d hit bottoet hier scared of what toht it

It did not matter, Shadow decided, if you had done what you had been convicted of or not In his experience everyone he : there was always so they said you did when you didn’t—or you didn’t do quite like they said you did What was iotten you

He had noticed it in the first few days, when everything, fro to the bad food, was new Despite thehorror of incarceration, he was breathing relief

Shadow tried not to talk too much Somewhere around the middle of year two he mentioned his theory to Low Key Lyesmith, his cellmate

Low Key, as a grifter from Minnesota, smiled his scarred smile “Yeah,” he said “That’s true It’s even better when you’ve been sentenced to death That’s when you reuys who kicked their boots off as the noose flipped around their necks, because their friends always told them they’d die with their boots on”

“Is that a joke?” asked Shadow

“Daht Gallows humor Best kind there is”

“When did they last hang a man in this state?” asked Shadow

“How the hell should I know?” Lyese-blond hair pretty much shaved You could see the lines of his skull “Tell you what, though This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks No gallows dirt No gallows deals”

Shadow shrugged He could see nothing romantic in a death sentence

If you didn’t have a death sentence, he decided, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons First, life creeps back into prison There are always places to go further down Life goes on And second, if you just hang in there, so to have to let you out

In the beginning it was too far away for Shadow to focus on Then it became a distant beam of hope, and he learned how to tell himself “this too shall pass” when the prison shit went down, as prison shit always did One day the h it So he birds of North America calendar, which was the only calendar they sold in the prison commissary, and the sun went down and he didn’t see it and the sun came up and he didn’t see it He practiced coin tricks from a book he found in the wasteland of the prison library; and he worked out; and he ot out of prison