Death Row

• Sadhika Santhosh, Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2022

Today, they’re putting another man on death row. Death by poison. Or the electric chair. Not sure which one. He didn’t deserve it, but the children’s protests were never heard. They’re smiled at, ridiculed, patted on the back, and told to go keep changing the world. Might as well have told us to chase butterflies, an amorphous dream that keeps fluttering out of reach.
Angrily, I glared down at the preposterously large red letters printed across the scrappy page, a leaflet tacked carelessly onto the wooden wall. Florists and bakers, silversmiths and marketgoers, they milled around me, oblivious to this abomination. How dare these false prophets claim such lies to be truths? How dare they continue to propagandize these obscenities in the public eye?
Turning around, I flattened my back to the wall’s splintered surface, pitted with pamphlet tacks and the grime of decades. I trained my eyes on the pristine marble columns, the curved dome, the blood-red flag, a glittering fortress shimmering like a mirage in the summer heat. The townsfolk looked towards Sina City as the foundation of their great nation, the hallmark of their so-called ‘peace’, the birthplace of civil disclosure and fair political authority.
But whenever I laid my eyes on that blood-red flag, I could only remember my father’s execution, remembering his guttural screams echoing and bouncing off the soundproof walls. Trapped in a chamber of paranoia and heightened neuroticism, his world went dark.
Blood red had dripped down the corners of his mouth when he bit his mouth in a frenzy. And when he finally broke free from the loose ropes, bare wrists and ankles chaffed from the mad struggle against imprisonment, his pupils were dilated and glazed over, like those of a cornered dog who knew he was about to die a cruel death.
Mouth unhinged in a silent scream, he charged headfirst into the stone wall, bashing his cranium against the unforgiving surface to escape until, with a great shudder, he lost consciousness and dropped down to the floor with a thump. He was dead. From the one-way vision window, I had silently stared, an impassive mark that betrayed nothing. He was no father of mine, only a war criminal and a madman. His torture and self-driven execution were a product of joining the Resistance, for daring to defy the Demon Lord.
The guards of the Vermillion Phoenix Clan guarded his powerful name, protecting his inflammatory policies that threatened to tear apart the barely sustained bipartisanship with the Azure Dragon Clan. The Vermillion capitol, Sina City, still stood proud and intact. But something suddenly caught her eye as Asher looked back into the distance at the capitol gates that guarded the city entrance.
It was the shine of freshly polished armour, glinting in the midday sun. An army. And at its front line waved a blood-red flag, emblazoned with the unmistakable symbol of the Vermillion Phoenix. The Demon Lord had begun his invasion, and the Resistance had just arrived. But it was too late.