I’ve always hated my face. It’s handsome enough, but ordinary. My eyes are decent and my eyebrows are thick. My chin is somewhere between strong and average, and my bone structure has some of the Native Indian in me. The overall effect is all right; an all right face that’s probably very easily dismissed. I’ve kept my hair wild and my mustache thin, but none of it seems like enough. I wanted to be my own disguise. It wasn’t about looks, vanity. It wasn’t about that.

Read the rest of Eric Boyd’s “Examination,” which won Second Place in Fiction in the 2012 Prison Writing Contest.