Between Manhattan and Queens sits an island that's been forgotten.
Yet it breathes; gasps when oily waves recede and spits when cold
green water crashes. Beneath the feet of children plucking blackberries
by the lighthouse, below the tennis courts and apartment buildings and
the asphalt; the island remembers horrors. Centuries of tortured bodies
and splintered minds seeped down through the island’s skin into its id.
One hundred and seven acres of pig shit and guts moistened its soil
for sin, and thus was born a prison that grew an asylum and a small-pox
hospital. The murderer, the moron and the moribund replaced the pink
squealing meat with disheveled hair and wild eyes and scared, hideous,
screams.

All around it buildings rose that needled and blotted the sky, buildings
filled with women and men and happy little children. Most did not know
the island. Those who did cursed it or forgot it or thought it mad as
those trapped in the clawed walls upon it. But there are two who will never
forget, two who will never forsake, for when they were young, they saw the
graffiti wrapped iron lungs inside the boarded up nurses residence.