• MY TIME

    The room is small. Four rows of desks crowd it. The executioner roughly straps my legs, my arms, my chest, forces a metal cage around my head and takes up his position beside the big switch. People have started to file in, ripples of accusation, fear, lies follow through the crowd. I can see Parker, he is staring at me, I can see the grief in his eyes. Louise is crying, great sobs that shake her body. Mr and Mrs Well are looking scared, but determined. tick.....tick.....tick.....
    Cold sweat is running down my face. My time left in this world is ticking away. tick….tick….Tick….
    If you have ever faced death, faced being erased from the world, you will know that you fade out, you don’t think, you focus on other things. I notice the colour of the walls, a dirty creamy colour, the paper at the top is pealing away, revealing cold stone. tick…Tick...TICK...
    There it goes, my life. I have been given the death sentence. No-one will morn me, I have no-one left. Tick..TICK..TICK..
    It is one thing to have your whole life, your whole reason for existence killed, but it is another to be convicted, wrongly convicted, of being the one who killed them. I will be buried here, in the prison grave yard, along with God knows how many other innocent bodies. TICK TICK TICK.
    Everyone is here, everyone is waiting, everyone is silent. The executioner reaches for the leaver, 3000 volts of electric will flood my body. He pulls on the leaver and… every thing seems to slow down. There is a bright light, it isn’t the gates of heaven, nor is it the gates of hell. It is sparks travelling down wires that lead to me. TICK -TICK - TICK.
    They say that just before you die, you see your whole life flash before your eyes. I see myself in a tree at the age of 7, watching a girl in a green dress, she is running and her red hair streaks out behind her, I fall out the tree and cut my head, leaving a scar above my eyebrow. I see a 10 year old boy chasing the same girl with a worm in his outstretched arm. I see a spotty teenager watching a girl with long red hair from across the room, hunger in his eyes. I see a tall skinny young man following a woman with green-grey eyes like the sea, hiding when she looks around, scared, I see him follow her to her house. I see the young man breaking in and... I see the same girl, lying on the floor at my feet, covered in blood, with a knife protruding from her breast. I look up and the window is shut, bloody hand prints all over the walls around me, trapping me. This is what I am being punished for, for murdering the girl I loved, if only she had known. I wander from room to room, it's all the same. A child, maybe 10 years old, is sprawled a bed, a huge slash across in his chest. In the next room, a girl, about 7, blood poring from behind her head, still leaning against the wall.
    A baby's cries reach my ears, I follow the sound to a small crib, it has been knocked over and the babe is on the floor. I pick up the little bundle of cloth and rock it back and forth in my arms.
    BANG, BANG-BANG. Someone yells something inaudible through the keyhole. I walk back through to the living room, where the baby's mother lies, and struggle with the window, leaving bloody handprints all over it, juggling the little one in my arms. Yes, I stabbed Katy Haron, I plunged a knife through her heart, I slashed a great hole in her son's chest, I smashed, her daughters head against a wall. But I did not kill her. I look down at the baby boy in my arms. I may have ended her life, but the man on the opposite side of the door killed her, he was killing her from the moment she said "I Do".
    She is, even now, so beautiful. I stroke her face. My hand leaves a red mark on her white face, I pull the knife out of her breast and carefully, caressingly, lick the blade, it is covered in blood, her blood, her precious, beautiful, blood.
    TICKTICKTIC-
    The thousands of volts of electricity reach my body, I’m not in pain. My body is shaking, and my eyes have rolled back into my skull, but I don't feel it. I feel anger.
    I can see him. I can see him now. Hot Anger, not blood, pounds through my veins. I recognise that face, those eyes. Those eyes that killed the woman I love. I see the man who will walk free into the world, while I will not see it again.
    My time, was up.