Dusted

By: RDV


The living have something more than death to offend him with. He isn’t pacing up and down the room or wringing his hands or even crying. His face is set in repose, seeming to have finally embraced the entire concept of death row. The room that is reserved for him, in which he is located at the present, is immaculate. The walls are whitewashed and so are the bed sheets. He has the bare necessities inside the closet. Every so often he would wonder why the prison administration would even bother when for him, there’s nothing to look forward to but his existence's post-dread and death whose arrival is tomorrow at eleven-thirty before afternoon. In this place, where the only thing that flourishes is fear, he is ironically far removed from panic. He no longer questions the loopholes of the law, as he was in the habit of doing in the course of his trial. He no longer lets tears fall down despite the deep and painful lacerations of his heart. He sits up on the bed, staring at the ceiling for the seventeenth hour. He can observe the surveillance camera that’s immovably hanging on the top right corner of his room. Every move he makes is being watched, measured and probably taunted. He’s being watched like a film for all to see. It’s part of the price he has to pay, he just knows; part of the cruelty he is rightfully subjected to. He closes his eyes in an attempt to force himself away from the sight of anything that drips with the flavor of life. Outside, the failing sunlight tumbles on the soil and from where he lays, his eyelids pulled down, he can see a bouncy life for the ones he left behind. He can remember the time when the judge pronounced his sentence. It has by far been the hardest struggle he has to put up with. It was hard to listen to those words, but is it easier than saying it? He wondered what the people who earned him the place felt, who slandered his name to the last. Have they incurred guilt, even if it was to be a moment too late? Maybe. But all that is past. No judgment can be revoked at this point anymore. He will be delivered, accordingly and arraigned, and no amount of time can ever convey the brooding his imminent death requires. He frees himself from those worries and slakes himself with the thought that at least, he isn’t denied the chance to breathe the same air with those he loves for the last time. In this newfound peace, he imagines the curtains drawing down. The breeze will no longer blow his way. He has lived and would soon be forgotten.