Post by novajanna on Mar 29, 2006 4:28:32 GMT -5
This was an attempt at for a short story competition, but I never entered it because I didn't think it had been worked enough...You opinions would be greatly appreciated.
***
It was dark. Then again, it was always dark there. Dark and dreary and grey and blank. Not that she’d been expecting it to be bright or entertaining, or even as full of hope and promise and life as the jail in “Chicago.” Which had been, she reflected, a pretty good movie, if not entirely unrealistic. That was actually the last movie she’d seen before her arrest, her trial, her sentence, and then being locked up in this God-awful place.
She couldn’t, wouldn’t, lie on her cot and stare at the ceiling, because it was even more boring than staring at her own bedroom ceiling. Which was, she thought, probably a sign of something, but she wasn’t even going to attempt to think straight.
About a week after she’d been, as she metaphorically thought of it, thrown into her cell she’d stopped counting down the days, stopped trying to make even a rudimentary friendship with the other women, and, most importantly, she’d stopped hoping that someone would come to see her.
She was going to die. Good-byes to her had always been important, and so she really wished she’d been able to say good-bye to her husband and daughter before she had killed them.
She didn’t think she’d killed them. She wouldn’t have, and she told her lawyer that- “If I’d killed them, I would have made sure to say good-bye first. I know I didn’t say good-bye.”-but it held little water, with both her lawyer and the rest of the world.
Ah, the rest of the world. The birds, the bees, the daffodil trees. Wait. Were there daffodil trees? Maybe…She couldn’t quite remember- No, there were no daffodil trees. There never had been. She was making it up in her head. She shook her head violently for a few moments, and then picked up a marker and a loose sheet of paper and she drew a daffodil tree. But it looked silly without yellow. She’d have to ask one of the guards for some yellow.
The rest of the world hated her. Maybe the birds didn’t, but the people did. She’d been told she killed her husband, her daughter, her two sets of next-door neighbours, and, apparently, a dog. “I wouldn’t kill a dog,” she murmured to herself. “Definitely not a dog.” She didn’t know her neighbours. Why would she kill them? Torture them, violently murder them, and pick them apart?
Random people on the streets who were asked what they thought of her for articles said she should burn in hell. Said she should have the most painful death possible. They didn’t know her. They’d never heard of her until she was accused. But worst of all, worst than strangers acting like they could judge her, was that there was no one. Absolutely no one who had said she wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t. No one.
The other prisoners were terrified of her. Those who knew what she’d done whispered or looked terrified of her. She found it absolutely hilarious, and laughed and laughed when they looked terrified. It only enforced everyone’s thoughts about how crazy she was.
But she was just a suburban housewife. Even the newspapers admitted that. They put a morbid spin on it, however, when they said all that cooking and cleaning had driven her to something awful. As if she’d been forced to look after her house and her family. As if their family, her family, had to have some deep dark secret to drive a perfect wife like her to murder.
What’s that got to do with the neighbours? And the dog? She thought. She always thought things like that, even though she was beginning to think they were dangerous thoughts.
Other people, those strangers, newscasters, talk-show hosts. They asked the same questions. “She may have had problems, but why take it out on the dog? Why the neighbours?” When she’d first seen that news broadcast, that small, pursed-lips woman speaking to the camera full of unbridled fervor, she’d agreed. But then she’d realized the woman wasn’t telling the media to stick it you-know-where like she wanted to. No, that withered, pursed-lips woman was talking to her. Asking her how she could take her personal problems out on innocent people. And a dog.
Her lawyer had been, she reflected dreamily, a rather nice man. Very experienced in his line of work, because she was willing to pay money. He was very tall and imposing, and was only graying and balding slightly. He carried a briefcase everywhere, which seemed like a rather stereotypical lawyer thing to do. But he was a good lawyer.
She was falsely accused! It was an outrage! Something that a first-rate lawyer like hers had been could clear up rather quickly, and maybe she could even get some money out of it, along with her reputation back.
She’d been full of self-righteous fury at first. Full of not anger, exactly- that came later- but disbelief. Doubt. “Me? Hah!” She’d felt like scoffing when she was first arrested. Maybe laughing. Maybe saying “OK, you’ve got me. My family has just been brutally murdered, and this is a sick-minded joke, but you got me.” She didn’t get a chance to say that.
She’d never been, curiously enough, mad at her lawyer. He truly seemed to believe her, but that was, after all, his job. Look convincing, be convincing, convince. He did an awfully good job convincing her, but unfortunately the judge and her lawyer didn’t see eye to eye.
And the judge…The judge didn’t seem to want to find the truth, he wanted to see someone put away for what he thought was an absolutely hideous crime. And it was, she said to herself, nodding. Very hideous. Judges shouldn’t find scapegoats, though, they should find the truth.
Otherwise, he was a pretty nice judge. I’d probably have liked him if he hadn’t given me the death sentence for something I don’t think I did. I don’t I could have done. I wonder why my alibi didn’t check out. I wonder what my alibi was. She paused in her line of thought. I wonder if I even had an alibi.
Now, on her thirtieth day in the dark, dreary, blank place, she knew. She knew she was perfectly, completely, and totally innocent, even though she still couldn’t remember what her alibi was, let alone if she’d had one. But she was innocent.
And because she finally knew for certain, she decided it was time to contact her lawyer once again. He was the first person that had come to see her the entire time she’d been in prison, and he was there strictly on business.
She told him she was innocent. He stared at her, and told her they could try for an appeal. She nodded dully, wondering what exactly that meant. She wondered about what this appeal could be the entire few days it took for her lawyer to set it up.
He told her that he’d found something wrong in the legal proceedings. And then he proceeded to talk in lawyer-speak, and she’d been lost in a happy daze, smiling and nodding and nodding and smiling. When he seemed satisfied that he’d explained it, he let her into a small room where she watched him argue with another lawyer who looked just like him (only his briefcase was a different shade of black) for what seemed like an eternity.
There was a different judge, a sterner judge but yet, at the same time, softer-looking. As if he dealt with her type all the time. She wanted to jump up and scream that she wasn’t what he thought she was, that she wasn’t one of them. . “I wouldn’t kill a dog,” she would have yelled. “Definitely not a dog.”
But she never did. Instead, she watched the judge’s shaky hands and glassy eyes, glinting with either hate or sympathy or a strange mixture of both. She watched her lawyer’s small glasses pinch his nose as he argued fervently. She watched the other lawyer shake his head and have his hair fall in his eyes like a shampoo commercial, only to shake it back out again when he began arguing just as fervently.
She ended up back in her cell, staring at her colourless, lifeless picture of the daffodil tree and crying. She hadn’t cried the entire time, but suddenly she did. It wasn’t as if she needed to, it wasn’t even as if she felt any real sorrow. The others walked past and, upon seeing her, hurried past. The guards shook their heads in sympathy, but others laughed. Or maybe she just imagined the laughing faces, scowling faces, withering, pursed-lip faces clouding in her mind with bright, yellow flowers.
The next day her lawyer came to see her. He had bad news, he said. Lawyers generally do, she thought, but tried to listen as he spouted off some more meaningless lawyer jargon. “It doesn’t make sense,” he finished with a defeated sigh.
She wholeheartedly agreed.
Another ten days of black. Of dark. Of colourless flowers. She avoided her face in the mirror when she brushed her teeth, and she always had everything in one neat, small pile in one corner of her cell. Sometimes she wished she had a cellmate, despite all the stories about cellmates, because then there’d be something other than the monotonous blankness.
But she was too dangerous to have a cellmate. That was funny. She’d probably have tried using quiche as a conversation starter, to break the ice. It wouldn’t have been cheese quiche with a hint of basil and arsenic either. It just would have been quiche, which wasn’t generally perceived as a very dangerous thing.
Then one day, she woke up and knew there was something different. When she couldn’t think of anything, she drew. She drew a face, like the one from “The Scream” only laughing. The colours would have been bright, she thought, if she’d had any. And as she trudged through her morning routine, she thought about yellow. And then, when she got back to her cell, one of the guards slipped her a yellow coloured pencil, small, blunt, like the ones her daughter would bring home at the end of a school year.
She coloured in her daffodil tree and decided she liked the contrast more than the overall picture. But she left “The Chuckle,” as she’d decided to call it, dark and grey and dreary and blank. Except for the words she wrote on the front in yellow, carefully spelling out the title of the piece in the right-hand bottom corner, as it was done. And then she flipped the page and wrote how she would never kill the two people she loved more than anything, or the four neighbours she’d never known. Or that dog.
She finished writing and the pencil fell to the floor. She cocked her head to the side and marveled at the daffodil tree, wishing they really had existed. A daffodil tree, right in my front yard. That would be heaven.
And then a guard came, one she’d never seen before, and it finally clicked. Today was D-Day. Today was Death Day. She snatched the pencil off the floor and slipped it into her pocket, putting on her immune face for the guard and the other two men standing behind him. She was taking her one last tiny slip of light and hope with her, but the daffodil tree she was leaving for everyone else.
***
It was dark. Then again, it was always dark there. Dark and dreary and grey and blank. Not that she’d been expecting it to be bright or entertaining, or even as full of hope and promise and life as the jail in “Chicago.” Which had been, she reflected, a pretty good movie, if not entirely unrealistic. That was actually the last movie she’d seen before her arrest, her trial, her sentence, and then being locked up in this God-awful place.
She couldn’t, wouldn’t, lie on her cot and stare at the ceiling, because it was even more boring than staring at her own bedroom ceiling. Which was, she thought, probably a sign of something, but she wasn’t even going to attempt to think straight.
About a week after she’d been, as she metaphorically thought of it, thrown into her cell she’d stopped counting down the days, stopped trying to make even a rudimentary friendship with the other women, and, most importantly, she’d stopped hoping that someone would come to see her.
She was going to die. Good-byes to her had always been important, and so she really wished she’d been able to say good-bye to her husband and daughter before she had killed them.
She didn’t think she’d killed them. She wouldn’t have, and she told her lawyer that- “If I’d killed them, I would have made sure to say good-bye first. I know I didn’t say good-bye.”-but it held little water, with both her lawyer and the rest of the world.
Ah, the rest of the world. The birds, the bees, the daffodil trees. Wait. Were there daffodil trees? Maybe…She couldn’t quite remember- No, there were no daffodil trees. There never had been. She was making it up in her head. She shook her head violently for a few moments, and then picked up a marker and a loose sheet of paper and she drew a daffodil tree. But it looked silly without yellow. She’d have to ask one of the guards for some yellow.
The rest of the world hated her. Maybe the birds didn’t, but the people did. She’d been told she killed her husband, her daughter, her two sets of next-door neighbours, and, apparently, a dog. “I wouldn’t kill a dog,” she murmured to herself. “Definitely not a dog.” She didn’t know her neighbours. Why would she kill them? Torture them, violently murder them, and pick them apart?
Random people on the streets who were asked what they thought of her for articles said she should burn in hell. Said she should have the most painful death possible. They didn’t know her. They’d never heard of her until she was accused. But worst of all, worst than strangers acting like they could judge her, was that there was no one. Absolutely no one who had said she wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t. No one.
The other prisoners were terrified of her. Those who knew what she’d done whispered or looked terrified of her. She found it absolutely hilarious, and laughed and laughed when they looked terrified. It only enforced everyone’s thoughts about how crazy she was.
But she was just a suburban housewife. Even the newspapers admitted that. They put a morbid spin on it, however, when they said all that cooking and cleaning had driven her to something awful. As if she’d been forced to look after her house and her family. As if their family, her family, had to have some deep dark secret to drive a perfect wife like her to murder.
What’s that got to do with the neighbours? And the dog? She thought. She always thought things like that, even though she was beginning to think they were dangerous thoughts.
Other people, those strangers, newscasters, talk-show hosts. They asked the same questions. “She may have had problems, but why take it out on the dog? Why the neighbours?” When she’d first seen that news broadcast, that small, pursed-lips woman speaking to the camera full of unbridled fervor, she’d agreed. But then she’d realized the woman wasn’t telling the media to stick it you-know-where like she wanted to. No, that withered, pursed-lips woman was talking to her. Asking her how she could take her personal problems out on innocent people. And a dog.
Her lawyer had been, she reflected dreamily, a rather nice man. Very experienced in his line of work, because she was willing to pay money. He was very tall and imposing, and was only graying and balding slightly. He carried a briefcase everywhere, which seemed like a rather stereotypical lawyer thing to do. But he was a good lawyer.
She was falsely accused! It was an outrage! Something that a first-rate lawyer like hers had been could clear up rather quickly, and maybe she could even get some money out of it, along with her reputation back.
She’d been full of self-righteous fury at first. Full of not anger, exactly- that came later- but disbelief. Doubt. “Me? Hah!” She’d felt like scoffing when she was first arrested. Maybe laughing. Maybe saying “OK, you’ve got me. My family has just been brutally murdered, and this is a sick-minded joke, but you got me.” She didn’t get a chance to say that.
She’d never been, curiously enough, mad at her lawyer. He truly seemed to believe her, but that was, after all, his job. Look convincing, be convincing, convince. He did an awfully good job convincing her, but unfortunately the judge and her lawyer didn’t see eye to eye.
And the judge…The judge didn’t seem to want to find the truth, he wanted to see someone put away for what he thought was an absolutely hideous crime. And it was, she said to herself, nodding. Very hideous. Judges shouldn’t find scapegoats, though, they should find the truth.
Otherwise, he was a pretty nice judge. I’d probably have liked him if he hadn’t given me the death sentence for something I don’t think I did. I don’t I could have done. I wonder why my alibi didn’t check out. I wonder what my alibi was. She paused in her line of thought. I wonder if I even had an alibi.
Now, on her thirtieth day in the dark, dreary, blank place, she knew. She knew she was perfectly, completely, and totally innocent, even though she still couldn’t remember what her alibi was, let alone if she’d had one. But she was innocent.
And because she finally knew for certain, she decided it was time to contact her lawyer once again. He was the first person that had come to see her the entire time she’d been in prison, and he was there strictly on business.
She told him she was innocent. He stared at her, and told her they could try for an appeal. She nodded dully, wondering what exactly that meant. She wondered about what this appeal could be the entire few days it took for her lawyer to set it up.
He told her that he’d found something wrong in the legal proceedings. And then he proceeded to talk in lawyer-speak, and she’d been lost in a happy daze, smiling and nodding and nodding and smiling. When he seemed satisfied that he’d explained it, he let her into a small room where she watched him argue with another lawyer who looked just like him (only his briefcase was a different shade of black) for what seemed like an eternity.
There was a different judge, a sterner judge but yet, at the same time, softer-looking. As if he dealt with her type all the time. She wanted to jump up and scream that she wasn’t what he thought she was, that she wasn’t one of them. . “I wouldn’t kill a dog,” she would have yelled. “Definitely not a dog.”
But she never did. Instead, she watched the judge’s shaky hands and glassy eyes, glinting with either hate or sympathy or a strange mixture of both. She watched her lawyer’s small glasses pinch his nose as he argued fervently. She watched the other lawyer shake his head and have his hair fall in his eyes like a shampoo commercial, only to shake it back out again when he began arguing just as fervently.
She ended up back in her cell, staring at her colourless, lifeless picture of the daffodil tree and crying. She hadn’t cried the entire time, but suddenly she did. It wasn’t as if she needed to, it wasn’t even as if she felt any real sorrow. The others walked past and, upon seeing her, hurried past. The guards shook their heads in sympathy, but others laughed. Or maybe she just imagined the laughing faces, scowling faces, withering, pursed-lip faces clouding in her mind with bright, yellow flowers.
The next day her lawyer came to see her. He had bad news, he said. Lawyers generally do, she thought, but tried to listen as he spouted off some more meaningless lawyer jargon. “It doesn’t make sense,” he finished with a defeated sigh.
She wholeheartedly agreed.
Another ten days of black. Of dark. Of colourless flowers. She avoided her face in the mirror when she brushed her teeth, and she always had everything in one neat, small pile in one corner of her cell. Sometimes she wished she had a cellmate, despite all the stories about cellmates, because then there’d be something other than the monotonous blankness.
But she was too dangerous to have a cellmate. That was funny. She’d probably have tried using quiche as a conversation starter, to break the ice. It wouldn’t have been cheese quiche with a hint of basil and arsenic either. It just would have been quiche, which wasn’t generally perceived as a very dangerous thing.
Then one day, she woke up and knew there was something different. When she couldn’t think of anything, she drew. She drew a face, like the one from “The Scream” only laughing. The colours would have been bright, she thought, if she’d had any. And as she trudged through her morning routine, she thought about yellow. And then, when she got back to her cell, one of the guards slipped her a yellow coloured pencil, small, blunt, like the ones her daughter would bring home at the end of a school year.
She coloured in her daffodil tree and decided she liked the contrast more than the overall picture. But she left “The Chuckle,” as she’d decided to call it, dark and grey and dreary and blank. Except for the words she wrote on the front in yellow, carefully spelling out the title of the piece in the right-hand bottom corner, as it was done. And then she flipped the page and wrote how she would never kill the two people she loved more than anything, or the four neighbours she’d never known. Or that dog.
She finished writing and the pencil fell to the floor. She cocked her head to the side and marveled at the daffodil tree, wishing they really had existed. A daffodil tree, right in my front yard. That would be heaven.
And then a guard came, one she’d never seen before, and it finally clicked. Today was D-Day. Today was Death Day. She snatched the pencil off the floor and slipped it into her pocket, putting on her immune face for the guard and the other two men standing behind him. She was taking her one last tiny slip of light and hope with her, but the daffodil tree she was leaving for everyone else.
