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From Bars to Bands: What the Paper Says: Stories of Prison and Redemption - Vol. 2
Paperback
Series: From Bars to Bands
Fiction AnthologiesGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 11 2026
Pages: 148
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.37 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Ten more people come home. The wall is never the one they expect.
Zeke Fontenot can weld a pipe joint that will outlive him. He cannot get through the gate at the refinery four miles from his apartment, because a federal credential runs a five-year clock and his has two years left on it.
Lettie Sharpe took care of other people's mothers for twenty-eight years. Her name is on a state registry now, permanently, and a federal exclusion list makes her presence in any building that bills Medicare a false claim - including at the front desk.
Marcus Thibault holds a federal credential to represent taxpayers before the IRS. The same government requires him to file electronically once he prepares eleven returns, and refuses him the number that lets him.
Cherise Lomax is exactly the person her state's cannabis equity program was written to repair. Four paragraphs later the same statute disqualifies her, by a measurement taken from a school fence.
What the Paper Says is ten linked stories about people who came home, learned a trade from somebody who had nothing to gain by teaching it, and ran into a wall that had nothing to do with what anyone thought of them. A welding shop. A home care agency. A tow company. A funeral home with a vigil roster. A used car lot where the compression numbers are printed on the window.
Every one of them does something wrong, or costly, or both, somewhere in the back half.
The stories are fiction. The walls are real - every one drawn from how licensing, credentialing and underwriting actually work in some part of this country right now.
Volume Two of five. Each volume stands alone. The city stays the same.
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