kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"Judgment"

words

Trepidation tickled the tick-tock thoughts attempting to traipse down his consciousness in a somewhat orderly fashion. Sensitive to a fault following infiltrated fantasies, his sleep having done far more harm than good, the train jumped the tracks and held its metaphorical ribs refusing to do anything productive in the slightest until it was allowed to catch its breath.

He closed his eyes and felt the sweat burst from his brow to gather in burly beads, his forehead brimming with thick tears, not to mention the stains sipping themselves thirstily through the arm-caverns of his clothing. Glistening drips trickled from his scalp in time-lapse imitation of the thicket of hair he'd lost yesterday, that years-ago yesterday that always seems closer in time than that which the cantankerous circling cacophony would attest to.

Momentarily the men would come and murder him with their meticulously counted vote. Magnanimity was not a gesture the proceedings could allow. The hard line of argument divided his plea from any chance of success, playing his well-known honesty and poverty, willfully unaccepting of help from any quarter. He had never had anything but his honesty, dishonest to the last.

Reflection on it brought him roundabout to his youth, as death or stress is wont to do. He had never quite gone wrong, but never right as well. Some he could blame on society, which had taken his quirks and personified them greater than life in himself -- he the touted and well-enjoyed black sheep of the city. What would his self have been if his youth and peers had not distorted him in such a manner? Cogitating completely on the task at hand, envisioning himself less than the larger than life lecturer, he saw no more than that. He would simply have been less than larger than life, an overly ordinary citizen with the usual quirk or two. It was better to die as he was than to live as everyone else, even though it meant him no more free than they. They were no more free than he, as much shaped by society, themselves choosing the normal and playing down their odd-ended minds. No different.

At a startle, he mopped his brow and coaxed his thoughts and with them his emotions onto the carefully constructed craft that would lead him to fame immortal. His back braced and his features calmed, becalmed above the storm to meet the verdict and frame fortuitous remembrance for posterity.

"What would it be?" he asked of the man that came to him. The man bathed in sad empathy, regardless that the emotion he felt and thus wallowed in lay only within his own breast, for he had felt himself a friend, or at least an admirer, of the construction that was about to be cast off this mortal coil.

His voice caught deep in the back of his throat and he looked at the simple, aged man with pity, though swallowed it down in the face of, he felt, a better man than he. "I'm afraid it's the hemlock for you, Socrates."