s p e e c h l e s s

middle school

[ synopsis ]
You commit a crime, you're caught with your red hands in cold cuffs, locked behind bars for a few days awaiting your sentence, then finally you're on death row. The end.

At least that's what everyone thinks. For they don't know that the executed can get a second chance at life. How, you ask?

Let's just say that people never stop learning.

- ××× -

"Dead man walking!"

First came the lights.

Then the pain.

Darkness. And everything that came with it.

Death is death. It may come in the form of a disease slowly eating away at your lungs, your heart, your brain, your everything. It may hit you hard with a punch in the ribs, a knife, a sledgehammer, even a truck if you're careless enough. At times it's just purely cutting away your lifelines--throat, arteries, or your head. However the method, it always ends with darkness. You won't even know what happens next anymore. You can't do anything.

Because you're dead.

Quite the majority of us can't and won't accept that, so now we have beliefs of life after death. Some say you either enter pearly, golden gates on clouds if you're pure or blackened, unforgiving doors if you've sinned all your life. Some believe you'd either end up a human in your next life or some lowly animal like a rat or a worm. Basically, the stakes are high, so be a civilised person while your heart's still beating.

My mistake? I wasn't a civilised person at all.

I should be mindless right now, forgetting my previous life in an explosion of fried neurons and sizzling matter. So it was a shocker when my eyes shot open and met white.

I bolted forward, gasping for air and clutching my chest. "I'm-I'm alive-"

I sat all alone in the execution chamber, except the chamber wasn't an execution chamber at all. Instead everywhere I looked, cream-coloured walls surrounded me, projecting strong memories of home. Nostalgia hit me like a wave as I stared at large windows that displayed deep blue skies and trees that burst with emerald green leaves. Breathless, I looked down at the electric chair, restraints undone, the only reminder of what I had gone through minutes prior. Or hours. Or even days.

Exactly where am I?

Minutes later, I stepped into a hallway of yet more darkwood doors that probably held more people like me. Carved wooden plaques were stuck to the wall beside the doorways, each one engraved with what looked like a name and something else below it. I turned to the closest plaque for reference. My own.

THEORI NUCLEO RAMONES

I snickered. Sounds like some great scientist's name.

BORN: JAN 1, XXXX
DIED: DEC 31, XXXX
ELECTROCUTION

All I could let out was an "uhh".

Frantic, I checked the plaque beside another door, then the next, until it became clear to me what these people had in common. Each marked themselves like an obituary, only now one may know how the person died.

All of them were on death row.

Is this some kind of facility designed to torture us again with reminders of our past mistakes? I thought, shoulders sagging. Not even a warning? No second chance at life?

I ran my hands over plaque after plaque, looking for the name of an inmate I had met minutes before serving my sentence. Sophie Arnaud. Beheading. Kit Ching. The stake. Jemimah Castanares. Hanging. Vincent Burtfield. Lethal inje-

"Oh, there he is." Vincent. I turned to a long, wavy copper-haired man, panting and holding what looked like a brown envelope in his hand. "Have you gotten your academic roster?"

I frowned. "My what?"

"Oh, you woke up way after I did. Orientation will start later downstairs. They're just handing out schedules and uniforms and stuff you need for a classroom and-"

"A-a classroom?" I stammered. "We're in a-in a school?"

Vincent was already walking towards the stairwell. "Apparently. Better hurry up!"

I didn't even have time to process every thing he told me. I just trailed after him like a lost puppy.

- ××× - : A.N.

summary: purgatory time B)

one whole day of roaming around in a college really does wonders huh

but shsshsjsjsjsjsi i'm yeeting this into my Stuff I Should Make Into a Full Book list