The Defendant | A short story - Fiction

‘Guilty!’ Pronounced the judge as he slammed his gavel down on the heavy wood desk. In unison, these two sounds echoed in the defendant’s head deafening his hearing from all the noise that arose in the courtroom. He feel back to his chair stared at his state attorney, who carried on shuffling papers without looking back at his client. The defendant shifted his eyes to his cuffed hands which he could not squeeze properly; an inability that he began to regard as the cause of his destiny slipping away from him.

The prison guard abruptly pulled his arm as to lift him up, the defendant looked around while walking into what now would define his existence, his new identity - that of a murderer. For, during the next 23 years he would be in prison.

This is the year 1903; from now on, for the next two decades, he would share a small fetid cell with another inmate whose religion drove him to madness. From now on, the weekly letters he used to receive would turn to monthly letters, which would become annual letters until they completely cease to arrive; very much like his visitors.

From now on he would dutifully chop wood, clean the patio, serve watered down soup to hundreds of criminals, who he despised equally irrespective of the seriousness of their crimes. The defendant did it all not because he respected the prison guards, but because the physical tiredness resulted from his chores sent him into a deep slumber every night, a time during which the torments of his mind would visit him through night terrors and nightmares.

In those bad dreams the defendant would truly murder the man he was mistakenly accused of killing. In real life he never murdered anybody; but, at this point his innocence only existed to annoy him, to drive him mad with revolt and resentment. His innocence now was a matter to laugh at, as it served him no favours. How, then, ‘can I rid myself of it?’ he pondered one morning as the flashback of the judge’s pronouncement interrupted the mechanical movements of some arduous task he was given.

‘That was it!’, he concluded with a mad side grin on his tired face; as if he had just found the solution of a problem which he’d been trying to solve for years. In order to live in peace with his new reality he had to deal with it as he could, in order to live up to the label the system gifted him with - that of a guilty man, he had to kill; not a man, but his innocence. The solution was there, right before him. Now, he just needed to find out how to put it in practice.

‘How do I kill my innocence?’ became the quest that consumed his awaken hours.

On a scolding summer day, out in the patio, while standing up, he clasped his hands on the back of his head and stared at the sun until he was blinded by it. In his white blindness the defendant saw his innocence pointing at, and making a mock of him, haunting him, really.

An image that reported him back to the evening when he calmly turned that dark corner; only to stressfully rush, in a few seconds later, towards the dying young man whose chest had been stabbed. In confusion, he extracted the knife and began searching the man’s pockets looking for a handkerchief or he didn’t know precisely what. Passers-by mistook the hero for the criminal. So did the dying man, who instead of telling the police officers ‘he was trying to save me’, whispered weakly: ‘he was trying to kill me’.

That was a memory that revisited him repeatedly. But, in this occasion it brought something else with it: a realisation; a realisation that what laughed at him was not his innocence. It was the ghost of it. For, his innocence was dead! It had been lynched by the passers-by, by the police, by his lawyer, the jury, the judge, by the system.