“Charlotte!” 

a smeared scream blurred in a surround of sudden silence. A dark black object was immediately recognized for its famous trail of death. The burly man behind me had crept it to the underneath of my chin and fired. Instant black lights and amnesia consumed my existence, and I couldn’t find the floor. Where am I?  

“Charlotte!" a familiar voice screeched my name, “Bethany, wake up, honey! It's a school day”.

 School day? I graduated two years ago. I arose in question from my twin size bed. Sheets covered in tiny cartoon monsters that had been in my favorite show as a young girl.  Gravedale High, a cartoon about one human teacher in a school of animated monsters. My favorite monster was Sid, the invisible boy.  

“Hey, What about me?” 

Sid yelled and vaulted towards the closed bus doors. Mom was undoubtedly magnificent at putting Gravedale on first thing each morning. If I weren’t mistaken, it was her favorite show as well. She just wouldn’t admit it. The dining room had a looming scent of bubbly nostalgia with my favorite cereal sitting in the heart’s center of the table. ‘Cookie Crisps,’ the cereal that I chose to be my very right hand of foods ever since I could begin to eat solids as a baby. I raced to the vivid pink bowl detailed with the hands of my mother and I from when I had just turned two. Within the second, I had not only reached the seat of my chair but had been looking down at a bowl that was not my own. There was an unbroken flow of a Tartarean inky red of a liquid on to the bleachy white tablecloths. 

    “What tiny hands for such a grown woman,” Mother said with the bowl in her hands as she looked at me. I felt panic as the undistinguished liquid endlessly began to cover the floor. This was a memory but not of my own. I felt a drowning sense of my own weakness. How do I leave this? One final line from Sid’s mouth crept out before the television, 

“you always forget me!”. 

There was a flicker as the women across from me smiled and then darkness. I became lifeless to the commotion around me. She's here; she can see. I felt tingling down my neck of a beastly breath lingering behind me. I shrunk under the table as the light flickered onwards, and I could see it — a demonic like a beast with ferocious intentions that were way beyond my comprehension. I felt stuck and choked up like there were words lodged in my throat but none a suitable answer to living through this. But death has a due date, and this doesn’t feel like the right time. 

The flooring fell beneath me, and once again, I was floating. Still stuck in the darkness and an utter question burning in my brain, where am I?. It was like I was passing through the disheveled mistakes of my soul, but instead of mistakes, it was nightmares. There was a breach in my mortality, and reaching the floor so unexpected left me feeling impotent in my knees. I collapse at one step, and a young girl with beautiful golden Cinderella locks approached me. She stood with a smile of glittering lip gloss dreams and her two front teeth absent from the picture. She had this lacquered, shimmering look in her eyes of an angel with the dress frilled illumination black and hued undertones of a pink princess from a movie. Beauty and the Beast, maybe? She’d shown this radiant light of royalty, yet feculent feet like a peasant. I know her. How do I know her? I found my body convulsing on the ground at my demented brain’s thoughts of this girl. Then I enter a new perilous plight of seizing. This is it; I’m dying. I’m three seconds away from brain damage, and I valorously start a cognitive count down. three, .........two….... 

A rapid blast of energy coursed through my body like I had been hit with a defibrillator. A stream of breath rushed out of me as if waking up from a nightmare. My face felt paralyzed in the expression of the screams in his famous painting by Edvard Munch. 

“Keep that mouth open too long, and you might just catch a fly in there!”

 said a dark southern lady from across the way. She was a beautiful young lady who I could already tell wasn’t going to waste her time on me. She reminded me of my mother, in a sense; an astonishing natural beauty and not a care in the world for what's really happening around her. 

“Hey?”

 I began to approach the women with larger trust issues than what I started with, 

“Do you know where we are?”. 

The dispassionate characteristic of the women managed to spiral, and she glared at me exasperated. “I don’t believe I know who you are,” she began to walk up to me, 

“what’s your business here? You couldn’t have possibly thought I wouldn’t have seen what you did, right?”.

 My hands began to swelter a piquant fluid, and my cheeks felt like old-fashioned hot burner flames on human hands, 

“I don’t understand.” 

“You don’t understand?” 

the women looked perplexed yet had a hind of uncertainty to the way she stood before me. I couldn’t tell by the tone of her voice if she desired to harm or assist me.  

“Quiomie, where are you, my sweet little girl?” yelled a voice from in the clay orange building. 

The women to the fore of me, Quiomie, then howled back at the establishment “coming!”. 

She glanced at me with returning content, “You best stay right where you are!”, she exclaimed as she trotted away.  

    I sat on bewilderment, and leaned on the wavering answers of indifference, but wasn’t able to stumble on my purpose here. I sat and looked at the past two transactions and then now. What's the reason I'm here? Each encounter was shown to be different images of myself with matching mental designs. It was as if I were present to the transpiring events, but absent in my visual form as a height five-three, female, at the age of twenty years old; who had appeared to have never stepped a foot in daylight. Instead, I have only ever been a young and tinier interpretation of myself. I’d say it to be a memory, but I don’t remember it in the slightest.  

    At that immediate thought, the atmosphere cracked around me like a fragile single pane window being hit by a baseball, and the color that consumed it then began to trickle out slowly like tree sap. The color turned dark and heavy like maple syrup swallowing my feet. The substance warped into lengthy rapid rampaging waters hurling me around like a rag doll while deep roaring wails of grievance come from the heavens above me. The skies gloomy with a hint of chaos while the waters became hungry, and I was engulfed as being sucked down by a whirlpool and inhaled in by the thick tenacious ink beneath the water's end. A mirror of myself appeared in front of me, consuming the deafening undertones of purgatory and torment as I could see a built figure of a man walk up behind me in the reflection and wrap his bicep around my throat as getting a stronghold for his next intention. I began to choke on the black ink while it gradually oozed down my throat. I could feel as his masculine callused hands traveled down my body and began to lift my black hello kitty dress. He pressed my torso forward against the wall and lunged at me from behind. I was caught trapped in a daze of myself with the feeling of prominent pain engrossing everything around me. Then, stiff to the feeling of something warm and sticky, exuding down the internal side of my thigh from my heated insides worked up by a hormonal rush.  

    The ink-like substance began to drain around me as a plug pulled from the drain to the bathtub, and the faint images of where I was began to appear less blurry. I felt myself respire, but the beat of my heart wouldn’t settle. My eyes began to swell and become sultry. A passionate sign of grief shown as I wept my remembrance. That little girl that stood before me earlier wasn’t just anyone; she was the forgotten trauma of my youth.  

 The atmosphere turned stone gray, and color began to climb the corners of existence. 

An echo occurred amongst the silence and generated to a bellow, “YOUR NOT AS INVISIBLE AS YOU THINK YOU ARE”. 

I felt my stomach sink as a television shot up at the corner of my eye. It was Sid spouting his famous verse as the invisible man. 

“You always forget me!” Sid exclaimed as I imagined him waving his discernable fist in irritation. The cartoon was on loop until shutting off to a static whisper, 

“You couldn’t have possibly thought I wouldn’t have seen what you did, right?”. I felt needled fingers pluck the soul of my being and throw me behind the scenes of a memory. I saw the outside view of myself after the accident. My mother looked as if she were hurting, and I did nothing to help that. I saw as she displayed a smile of the love in her heart to me, and the temperature in my cheeks rose. I found I was powerless as I watched myself send the bowl of my childhood crashing to the ground and the cereal, I loved painted the floor in letters of regret while I saw my mother begin to clean the mess as I trudged back to my room presumptuously cold to my surroundings. 

I remember locking myself in my room for a week after that and being dragged out by a medic in baby blue colors because I refused to take care of myself. I wanted to die. I wanted death to storm into my room with a new taste for my blood while he murmured to me that my time was up. But that didn’t happen. My mental thought process was forever ruined by a sickening phycological wound. I felt there was no other way out. So, I transcribed a plan, worked out any plausible obstacles, and devised a day to execute. 

Crimes are known for their botchery, leaving things like fingerprints or DNA behind that in the end point to their origin. However, what if your plan in committing a crime is to be caught in the end? What if you do something so terrible that you must die for it?  

The fourteenth of November at 12:30 p.m., I was eighteen, and it was finally time for me to do as I planned. I was on vacation in Mississippi in the country with my mother. We were staying in a small condo nearby three clay orange buildings. My mother was out in the garden as usual since we got here. I waited with a freshly sharpened butchering knife in hand until 12:35 the time she scheduled to make lunch for her and I. I calculated the time just perfect so that the people next door would see and call for help. As my mother approached the doorway, I hid right by the entrance and lunged at her kicking her knees in and knocking her off balance to the ground, making my knife's presence known as I drive in my first stab. Her screams grew in agony as she teared up from the degree of pain she faced. My cold presence phytologically began to tune out her existence as I kept impulsively spearing the knife to meet her chest.

 The moment left the body in a painful shock as it mustered up the strength to pull me closer and gurgle the words “I love you” softly in my ear one last time for its departing. 

Only five minutes later, to the police's arrival as they motioned me to the ground and tightly wound me in restraints. I am now a convicted criminal, and it's my time to make my existential mark and receive a death penalty for my wrongdoing. I'm brought to a holding cell where there are many other mentally destroyed individuals with the characteristic of being high on drugs or a dead beat of an alcoholic.  

By the time of my trial, I refused my right to an attorney. I was ready to plead guilty, accept the death penalty, and leave forever. But as I attended the meeting with a briefing of my legal rights, they said I wouldn’t speak. Why? I grew furious as the incandescent flames of my soul spread hungrily like a wildfire. I had a meticulous plan. An entire thought process with calculated events and now this?  I stood silent in the meeting while being restrained like an animal with two men in navy blue by my side. The police essentially had me on a leash at this point and still weren't satisfied. Everywhere I turned in any situation; they were there during the days of the trial. Until finally, the last day of the verdict on my twentieth birthday. The trial had taken what felt like too long, and I sat in my chair waiting for the judge to shame me for what I've done as my body sat queazy, wanting everything to finally be over with. I'm tired of sitting here in this courtroom with the same jury who looked to soft to even give the death penalty. Will I need a plan B? maybe if I attempt to run out of this courtroom now, they'll shoot me and get this over with.  No Charlotte, you're getting impatient again, the judge’s about rule his verdict. 

 The judge carried no remorse to his words, and his face stood stagnant to emotion as the letters of each word dance right off his tongue. 

"Please rise."

The jury rises with me to the judge, and I wait to hear the music of a guilty verdict. 

the judge turned to the jury with impervious interest in meeting the cases end, "Have you reached a verdict?".

"We have your honor," a jury representative spoke nonchalantly.

"What say you?"

"We the jury, in the case of the Charlotte Valatie

find the defendant guilty of all charges of premeditated murder to the first degree."

As they ruled the verdict, my cheeks tugged upward into a smile of fulfillment and I was satisfied.

The judge began again with a finalize punishment for what I've done, "The defendant will serve life in prison." The courtroom started crawling the little voices of big men well, my heart dropped as my shame covered my info structure, and I began to weep.

The world grew dark, and I remembered everything, but the reason I'm here. The black spiraled around me as it led me down to a cell of my nightmares. The atmosphere smelled damp as the sheets were stripped of my stained mattress. They were stained from my monthly regular the guards cared less for. A loud alarm went off as my cell door unlocked to indicate recess for the inmates. It’s now time to go to the dreaded courtyard to fight and shive each other like reckless beasts. They weren't getting out anytime soon, but neither was I. 

As I traveled to the courtyard from upstairs, each step counted; if I’m not careful, it’ll give the guards a reason to beat me with batons like the wicked grueling people they are. I continued to walk in my silence as the other made it to the yard I made a u-turn for a drink. On my way back down the stairs, two arms slinked me from the silence into the shadows and held my throat with readiness for his next step as he pulled a gun from the back of his pants and placed it under my chin. 

The man muttered the words, "Your kind deserves to die".

In that split second, an officer saw a gun from the corner of her eye and began to run for me screaming my name. The man fired, and I drifted to the light of reality.

The last words I heard were of my name in an attempt to stop my fate. A lit tunnel appeared with two precise memories before me. As I walked closer, the details enhanced, and I began to blank as they flashed in the coating of my imagination. The first option shown a little girl with a content look in her eyes as blood lathered her hands, and a woman lay before her lifeless, whereas the second option was of an older woman holding a photo album to what looks to be her fully grown offspring. I looked down at my palms of impurity with the realization that I had the option to undo everything as I walked into the first memory and saved myself from change to see my beloved Sid one last time as a child.