Justice

He waited in the dark silence, listening. Listening, upon his worn gray cot on a rotten plank of wood(bits of which he had chewed after they took away his cigarettes), for footsteps. The dawn was approaching but he didn’t dare sleep. He wanted to be ready when they came for him. Then there was the priest who had tried to find something in him, lead him to God. He was just like the magistrate. They thought they knew his soul better than he did. They both had rambled on, assuming things about his heart that were never true. And here was the priest, telling him how much he pitied him to not yearn to know God, denying the fact that there was not a single particle in him that gravitated slightly to a divine being. None of the others before him had ever refused God, all of them had broke down and wept and welcomed Him into their hearts immediately. Well, he didn’t give a damn about God. You’re a waste of time, get the hell out! I don’t need your fucking pity! Screaming and screaming and beating him against the sweating stones from which faces of loved ones never did appear. Four of the guards had to wrestle him off. The priest sent him one last exasperated, pitiful look before turning away, trembling. He must have finally given up trying to win him over. But what a sore loser he was.

            Back to the cold, still silence. Waiting. They always came at dawn(but he didn’t know when dawn would come because it felt like it had always been black outside and it would forever stay black. You lost track of the days when you were where he was). Lying there, he’d already accepted the moment and what footsteps would bring. He tried to picture it over and over again in his mind. When he got it to look right, he couldn’t stop. He felt the still cold darkness swallow him over and over again and listened to the steady beating of his heart somewhere deep in his chest. Then he fell asleep.

            He woke to the rising noise of shoes walking up the hallway. It was time to go. Right now, tomorrow, fifty years later- it didn’t matter. Of course it was unfair, but who ever said life was fair? Or more like, who ever said death was fair? He chuckled to himself. It always ended the same anyway. But still. A shudder. Then a shadow appeared through the bars, its hands shifting slightly around the lock. The stark, chilling rattle of the chains pierced his eardrums, tearing the eternal silence like a window breaking in the middle of a long prayer. Walking back down the hallway with the shadow following close behind him, he thought of his dead mother suddenly for the first time. Well, he had thought of her before, but in a way he never really did. And right at that moment he finally understood the thoughts that filled her useless gray head when she laid on her deathbed, because now he was lying on his too. The unusually free feeling when Death has found you and is staring you in the face, the detached weightlessness from knowing it’s the end and you’ve got everything yet nothing to lose.

           And as he stepped out the doors into the cold crack of dawn, he inhaled deeply. He breathed in that chill so heavy with the same hate and oppression and disgust and injustice he had felt from the spectators through the unbearable afternoon heat of the courtroom. And in that inhalation, he welcomed into his heart something better than God would ever be. He welcomed the cold indifference of the world in which nobody and nothing ever mattered. All that mattered to him now was to savor just how right he had been about his life all these years(to hell with the priest and magistrate), about a pointless thing called living. Ha! Indeed the whole universe was absurd!

           From another man’s point of view, he had sort of lost it- you could see it in the big smile on his face- for what had you to frown about when you were in his place? It was as if he was saying to everyone, “Give it your best, hate me with everything you have, laugh lough when they hold my head ready! ‘Cause I’m going to die now, and none of this would have ever been real!”



          Poor thing. He wasn’t even the right man.