The Corner House

By Chad Corrigan

Was what the locals called the KGB building in Riga, Latvia 
I was told to bundle up
The building was cold
As a museum, it’s shitty
There’s no polish. No gift shop.
A bleak ticket window, a few books on a shelf
It’s an accidental time capsule 
Calling it preserved is too generous
It’s old and run down
No one has lovingly cared for it
How could they?
The tour guide prefers the term Cheka
As he describes abductions, arrests
It’s winter
Cold narrow hallways
Interrogation room
It’s all painted bland sickly pallet
Chipped paint
Everything is drab
Table and chair, double sided mirror
The beginning and the end
Down the hall 
Cells
Cold painted metal
This room was meant to hold 10 prisoners 
It routinely had 30
We go deeper
Past more cells
We step outside to the narrow yard
It’s overcast and grey
This portion has mug shots mounted with brief summaries 
Name
Age
Crime
So many are young 
15 years old 
Who were organizing 
Wanting to push back
To fight back
Rounded up before they really had a chance
Many scratched their names in the wall so someone would know
We head back in 
The kitchen
Where a rotten fish broth was prepared 
Which often made everyone sick
We continue down
The last room
Where the executions happened
Murders
The wall riddled with bullet holes 
The adjacent door leads to a garage
Where the body would be loaded into a truck 
and disposed of in the surrounding woods
Never to be found 

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Chad Corrigan is a Soldier and helicopter pilot. His writing has appeared in the anthologies: Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War, Things We Carry Still,  Proud to Be: Writing By American Warriors, Volume 12, and the journals So it Goes, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, ISSUED: Stories of Service, and As You Were: The Military Review.