Melany Fellington is a young girl who lives in poverty in a changed world. She doesn't have what others have the room to have, but family made what she has more than enough. During substandard times of oppression, an interference threatens her famil...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
• • •
(Three hours ago) Flashback
After I saw a yellow envelope slide under the bedroom door, I approached it. But as my feet carried my body closer to the slim yellow file, my beating heart immediately dropped and constricted when my eyes scanned the text in bold '08/17/27 - Trial of Tamari Fellington'
I picked up the yellow file in my hands and quickly opened the door to see who put it here, but when my head whipped down both sides of the long hallway, no one was there. My vision now sharpened after I squinted my eyes as an attempt to see if anyone was hiding, but the results were disconcerting when I couldn't see anything. Frustrated, my eyebrows furrowed tightly as I closed the door and backed away from it.
I was immensely skeptical about where this originated from, or from who it came from, but the yellow file possessed the official government seal on the top right corner of it, paired with the watermark, beside the bold black text that read my mother's name in the very center of it.
Creating a precise and exact copy of an official government watermark seal that was created by the various advanced technologies that only the government possesses is impossible, and not a single person that has a past of counterfeit or fraud has the capable capacity of knowledge to mimic it. The government made it impossible to mimic the watermark purposely with years of developing the technologies to carry it out, and knowing that this yellow file is truly authentic unsettled me, giving me no comfort in doubt.
My watery gaze focused on the bold black text. This yellow file contains contents related to my mother's trial. The person who took the blame for my crimes when I should have been the one who faced the trial. Not her. Not anyone, but me, and I'm so angry, so angry with myself, and afflicted that it wasn't me.
With burning eyes and shaking hands I opened the yellow file and inside was a tablet. My lips started wobbling as a tiny sob broke through them because I'm so terrified, and my heart was twisting with every single beat. The rhythm in my chest pounded in its rhythm painfully, every thump threatening to puncture and break my ribs, the sharpened bones that were meant to protect the muscle, leaving it bare to torment, cutting and stabbing the muscle instead. But in this rhythm was also the desire to know what happened to my mother and the strong feeling that the self blame that I had from before was not misplaced in my heart, this self blame that's an internalized thing of memory that belongs there.
My hands were still shaking as I took out the tablet, and the screen automatically turned on, revealing a bright courtroom with my mother standing in the middle of the floor. My mother still looked sick from the viral sickness that she acquired because of malnutrition. Her skin was pale, but her face was neutral and there was no fear anywhere, only the selflessness and the love that she has for her children, and my eyes welled up with tears of love, of fear, of heart ache, of emotional hurt as her daughter, of guilt, and shame...so much crippling shame.
