Proving Innocence

1

The South Loop of Chicago is loud. 

The honking of car horns is like a second language, and drivers will find any barely-justifiable excuse to lay on their horns, even if it made absolutely no sense to anybody but the driver. In the afternoon and in the early morning, one could expect a cacophony of the daily commute of the 9 to 5 workers. But when the sun went down, as everyone was finally back in their homes or were busy working their night shifts... that was a time of peace. Peace was exactly what Vanessa Ador needed in order to do her job. Granted, there was always going to be noise: the symphony of never ending sirens wailing up and down the roads, the rumbling of the Pink Line zipping along the tracks just along the wide windows of the her studio apartment. But that was a mere compromise when living downtown. She sat at a desk, the grey streak of the elevated train just in her peripheral view, clacking away industriously at the keys of her Macbook. 

Police shoot yet another unarmed Black teen, she wrote. Vanessa stopped typing and stared her document. The glowing blue lights of her screen made everything around her seem like endless nothingness. Just her and her laptop, a relationship that was vital. A necessity. She huffed, slamming her finger against the backspace and watching as the letters disappeared. She tried again, chewing on the skin of her bottom lip.

She wrote, Cops Continue To Devalue Black Lives. She stared once again, dissatisfied. "No," she grunted under her breath, though she was alone. Frustrated, she pulled her mass of chocolate curls from her face and forced them into a hair tie. This was a common practice for Vanessa — about as common as prayer is for a Catholic. It was 5 o'clock in the morning. The sun was beginning to rise, and it was only a matter of time before her window of opportunity was going to close and she would be forced to deal with the outside world. The world in which she would catch the train to her miserable job, she would work for what would feel like an eternity at her miserable job, and catch the train home from her miserable job only to start the process all over again. Day after day after day after day.

Vanessa stared at her unfinished piece, and looked out her window. It would likely be a great view of her part of Chicago, would it not be for the elevated train platform blocking a majority of her window. The orange glow from the street lights poured onto the dark wood of her desk, kissing the floors and the walls and brushing ever so lightly against her bed in the corner, dying her white comforter into a soft copper color. Her eyes traveled along the platform, unintentionally locking with a stranger waiting for the train to arrive. Vanessa frowned, taking a mental note to invest in blinds.... eventually. She looked back down her screen, and placed her fingers back on the keys. She stared at the screen for a minute, maybe two, and slowly began to type. 

Once again, she wrote, a Black child has been shot dead by the hands of those who have sworn to serve and protect us. Once again, there will be a mother mourning the murder of her baby. Yes, I will refer to him as a child. Yes, that is her baby. No matter how headlines choose to refer to him, that was a child. There is a mother who must now bury her baby when she should be planning for his junior prom; she must pick out the last suit he will ever wear rather than coordinating colors with his date, or sending him off to the dance, or seeing him graduate. Because now the last time she will see him is not when he goes off to college — but as he's being lowered into the dirt with four bullet wounds in his body, two of them in his face, making it too hard for her too even leave the casket open so the last time she truly sees her baby will have been in the morgue when she was asked to identify her son.This mother's heart will never be mended. But nobody seems to care. Nobody will care because they will blame her when the media describes him as a 'thug' or claim that he was affiliated with gangs or claim that he was armed. They will try to tell you that he was reaching for a weapon when countless eye witnesses negate such statements and everyone that has ever known him will scream from the mountaintops that he wouldn't even know how to use a weapon if it was handed to him, nor would he argue with an officer to invoke such assumptions of an attack because his mother raised him better than that and he was always respectful, and that he was an honor roll student with a bright future...