Different

I remember the dream I had the night they put me in but I hardly recall the actual trial. 

Both, I suppose, were taking place in dark, musty rooms filled with shadows of people I used to know. Their faces, mostly enveloped by darkness, melted together into a mangled black mass. In that moment, if you, if anyone, asked me to name them, I would have made up some jumble of words that would have nothing to do with the names on their ID cards. 

Those people didn't speak although some, like my mother, wept theatrically. When the trial was over, leaving me sitting in a tiny, hard chair, still too shell-shocked to speak, that same woman would stand and throw her tear-soaked tissue in my face. It would stick to my Sunday suit, all ironed out and stiff in the arms. I would look at it. White and crumpled. Such a stark contrast to the darkness of the my jacket. Finally I gazed up into her face and saw her mouth that one word over and over. 

I do not remember her standing up in the dream. She didn't speak, or weep there. She sat in silence, slender ivory arms folded in her lap. She watched me from out of a featureless face and the word, the one my mother repeated over and over in the waking world, hung on the air between us with chilling determination. 

I looked up into the darkness overhead and saw, with heart skipping a last desperate beat, the broken frame of a body dressed in a black judge's coat. Blood dripped from full, cracked lips tinted blue as the corpse spoke. Its jaw cracked starkly in the silence of the room. 

'You have been found guilty,' it said. 

I faced it, my own jaw working to voice the question that has been, for the last four months plaguing me every minute of every day. The question came, but not from me, not from the crowd. It was whispered on the wind that pushed past me, flowing gently toward the bleeding, pale apparition sitting behind the stand. 

'What of?' it asked. 

The crowd stirred in their seats again. They rose, one by one, creating a wall of shadowy figures. I couldn't help but be overwhelmed by awe as they stepped forward, all together, a perfect engine of death's domain, and lifted their hands of white, crooked fingers to point at my face. 

Their voices became one and filled the room with a deafening roar of gospel.

'Of being different then the rest!' 

I looked down at my Sunday suit, pulling at my sleeves to cover the tattoos peaking from under the crisp shirt. I hung my head. There was no point in denying the verdict.

In my dream the jury sang about Jesus and swayed in perfect harmony while the corpse overlooking the trail cackled on its stand and smacked its hammer on the wood in a series of quick, uncompromising thuds. 

Fragment, June 2020