The bell is ringing. As I wake up, I look out the window. The city is beautiful. A light snow had fallen last night and the streets are covered in the slush. It’s funny how things that I had hated when I was free look so different now. The door to my cell screeches opened and I go out the steel metal grated bars and look at all the prisoners flooding into the main room of the building. We are all dressed in the same drab light grey and white striped clothes, and we are all extremely dangerous. Or, that’s what the label said on the sign when they moved me here on the day of my arraignment. I was accused of murder, first degree. They accused me of killing my wife and child. They say I shot them.
I didn’t do it.
I have already gone to court, and I have already plead innocent. However, I am the only suspect. The neighbors say they saw me do it. They said they heard me and my wife arguing the night before. I don’t remember arguing. I don’t even own a gun. I loved them both and would be willing to die in the most horrible way for them. When I get out of here, I will find who did it. I don’t care what it takes. I will find the person that did this to me and my family. I will find them and I will make them pay.
“Get a move on!” screams an impatient prisoner as he tries to squeeze by me. I chuckle to myself as I think about the fact that he couldn’t get past me even in the wide hallway. I begin to wonder how he got so large from the small prison portions. His metabolism must be extremely slow. I begin to move down to the square where the rest of the prisoners eat, socialize, and occasionally fight. Nobody really pays attention to the fights anymore. It’s more of just a place to eat and listen to the dreamers talk about how their plan of escaping is just falling into place. As I listen to one particular “escape artist” speak and eat my breakfast, two armed guards come up to me and start to guide me toward a pair of heavy steel double doors. I have never seen anybody go through those doors. I also don’t get a good feeling when the more “seasoned” convicts give me their sad stares. Even the man who shouted at me earlier, shakes his head and looks at the ground.
As I move through the double doors they hiss shut behind me, I can feel fear starting to grow, based just at the pit of my stomach. I am going down a hallway now. There are doors on both sides. Almost all of the rooms have light shining out of their fogged windows, but there are no noises coming from the inside. The last one we come to is lit and there appears to be a single voice coming from inside. I start to listen in casually as the guard fumbles with his keys to get the next set of steel double doors open.
“No, he can’t know, it’s better this way…” There is no response.
“I’m sorry, you can’t visit. He would know something is up then.”
A pause ensues before the voice says, “It’s time now, I must go. Goodbye.”
I hear a click, a phone is being set down on the receiver. I only have an instant to look away before the door opens and a man in a white lab coat steps out of the office. He is quite ordinary. Grey hair, the wrinkled white lab coat, and a look of tiredness mixed with a look that one might suspect to be pity.
“Ahh, excellent I was worried that I would miss you. I was running a little late but I appear to have caught you in the nick of time.” Neither you nor the guards say a word and the door slides open.
The room I enter is quite small. And also quite ordinary, painted gray, with a couple of desks. However, in the very center is a chair. Beside it is a complicated assortment of wires, tubes, and tanks. There is a computer sitting on a desk nearby and I begin to fear the worst. “Don’t kill me!” I scream and I start to tug against the guards.
“Calm down,” the doctor says in a tired but none-the-less convincing voice. “You are not being killed, quite the opposite actually. We are letting you free. You have been deemed innocent as of yesterday.”
“Then what's th-the chair for?” I say in a stuttering voice. “It’s just so that I can test to see if you are really healthy enough to be let back into society. The chair tests chemical compounds from your body to see if you are really all that healthy. You know being in prison like this can really mess with your head.” The doctor says in an even more convincing voice.
Instantly my heart soars, I’m free! I hurry up and get to the chair and can hardly keep myself from skipping. I sit down and feel the doctor start to plug me into the chair. “Wait but…” I start but the doctor motions for me to be silent. I fall silent and I am just start to ponder why a clear fluid is pumping into my arm and not out of it. Now it starts... memories from my childhood. Long lost images of ice cream trucks and water parks. Of prom, of my wedding, of my son’s birth, of his first day of school, of an argument, and finally a pair of gunshots. I look up and see my memories displayed on the screen.
“You have been convicted guilty of first degree murder and have hereby been sentenced to death by euthanization,” the doctor says as I look up at him, an expression of pure shock on my face. And suddenly I remember him. I have never met him before. Just seen a picture of him on my wifes phone. The look of pain in his eyes is the last thing I see before I die. The last thing I see is the look pain in my father-in-law’s eyes.