The Writers' Circle

He gripped the brass dock handrail with fierceness trying to control the tremors, as he lifted his eyes and stared ahead sullenly, the sweat of dread stippling his forehead and sending rivulets of it down his back.  
In the last few months' on remand in prison, charged with the murder of a teenage prostitute, he had aged.  He had lost over three stone in weight. His once handsome face tanned and ruddy now slack with fear, was cringing and sallow with prison pallor. The hard angles of his jawbone rigid with muscle stress, through a constant grinding of his teeth. His dark blue eyes had lost that gentleness, now dulled and sunken in darkly circled sockets through a lack of restful sleep. 

There was something feverish in the stern resonant voice of the High Court Judge as though he was trying with a detached abhorrence to purge away the taste of repugnance that he felt for the man in the dock.

'James Morgan, you have been found guilty of Murder.  A murder so shocking that it beggar's belief that one human being could have destroyed the life of another in such a horrific manner. Your act's of violence towards this child were deplorable and are some of the worst I have had the misfortune to come across in all my years of sitting on this Bench.  It is my duty to bring the full weight of the law down on you, and my judgement is, that you shall go to prison for life. In your case, I make a recommendation that life should mean life. Take him down.' 

Almost instantaneously, the packed gallery burst into an undignified round of applause and cries of approval, un-befitting the grandiose surroundings echoed around the oak-panelled courtroom 
'Bravo.' 
'Well done.'
'String the, bastard up.'

 James felt the quick rush of tears fill his eyes at the terrible words, and the leap of his heart made him gasp aloud. He stood alone in the dock paralysed with shock, his eyes screwed tight.  The taunts were peppering his armour and he tried so hard to clamp his mind down on the sting of it. As the tears rolled down his cheeks unashamedly, suddenly his knees buckled under him and he sank to the floor shaking with fear. Half-dragged, half-carried they forced him from the dock.  'No! I'm innocent, I didn't do it.  Oh, God, please, I didn't do it.'  His anguished voice trailed off some-where deep in the cold forbidding labyrinth of the court holding cells below. 

This was James Morgan's life from now on, one that he could expect to have to suffer in silence. As a convicted child killer he was hated by other convicts, despised and persecuted by the staff. He had nobody, not a living soul, only his thoughts, and an eternity in which to contemplate them.
 	He sat on the end of his bed and stared down at the sheet of writing paper, still blank that lay on his table fastened to the cell wall.  How should he start? What should he say?  What was the point? No body cared whether he lived or died.  His wife, his friends all despised him. Nobody believed that he was truly innocent. 

For the umpteenth time that night, his locked cell door suddenly shook violently as his tormentor's booted feet slammed into it. Then the frenzied threats followed.  

'Beast, beast, beast, we're gonna cut you're fucking throat, get off the wing you, bastard.' 
	He lowered his head into his hands and felt the sickening despair fill his whole being. 
`
A number of things registered in his mind simultaneously: the giggling laughter of his two children, the heady smell of infantile freshness as he tucked them into bed and kissed them goodnight, the sight of familiar surroundings and the comfort and pleasures of a life still to be filled. Now, never to be again, lost forever. 

He felt an almost dreamlike sense of reality as he slowly got to his feet screwing the paper into a ball. Every bone and every muscle in his body screaming out in torment from the beating he received in the prison reception. He leaned against the wall and struggled to control his breathing, the pain in his crotch agonising with every step.
 Now, tired and afraid, afraid at what he was about to do he tore the bed sheet into strips. 
With haste now, the seconds dripping like raindrops into the pool of time, as if measuring what was left of his life.   The throbbing at his temple matching the rhythm as he worked knotting the sheet into a noose. 
Soon, it would be over.  

Should I pray he thought?  

As he tied the sheet around the window bars, the drubbing pulse in his ears beat out as if in a countdown to the end. It will be over in seconds. Standing on the central heating pipe he placed the noose around his neck and pulled it tight. The tears now trickling candle fashion down his cheeks, the pounding in his ears beating like a military drummer, he began to pray. 'Our, Father, who art in heaven, hallowed.'
He slid off the piping slumping down hard, the noose tightening around his neck strangling him.  He couldn't breath, he couldn't swallow. His larynx jerked up and down involuntarily as if in a manic distress at the ending of its life.  The vivid red mask of nearing oblivion tinged with cyanosis filled his vision, his eyes bulging, threatening to spring free from their socket, stared ahead at something only he could see.  The pounding in his skull filled his brain with the noise like huge Atlantic breakers crashing on a pebble beach.  His mind still prayed. Forgive us our trespasses as we for...... Suddenly his body jerked, once, twice, three times, as the excruciating shooting pain in his chest spread upwards and outwards like fork lightening. His vision weaving fantasies out of the rushing darkness; the shapes moving and fluttering like small aquatic life in a pond of stagnant water. 

His panic now subsiding, being slowly replaced by the cold embracing certainty of death. 
Falling now, falling into nothingness.