Sylvia Almost Gone

Part One: The Defense

"Jesus, when is this thing going to start?"

Sylvia had been growing increasingly impatient for the past forty-five minutes as she sat restlessly in the creaky, lopsided wooden chair provided to her by the courtroom. The light oak table in front of her was scratched and dry and the papers strewn across it looked sickly and out of place, she thought. She wanted to stand up and organize them, or at the very least skim over some of them because she really didn't have a clue what was on them, but her lawyer had told her several times to sit still.

When Sylvia grabbed at a strand of her hair to mindlessly twist it into a braid, a habit she picked up in grade school that reared its head whenever she got nervous, her lawyer had insisted she not fidget. "It makes you look anxious about something," Vivian had said, firmly placing a manicured hand on Sylvia's bouncing leg to settle it.

Off her question, Vivian shot Sylvia an irritated glance. "The Judge is busy," she said, flipping through the stark white pages of a packet in front of her. They looked like they had just freshly come out of the printer, and Sylvia wondered to herself if Vivian should have prepared some things before the day of the hearing. This was all very last minute, she supposed.

Past where Vivian was sitting next to Sylvia, she leaned forward to get a glance of the prosecution's table to her left. It was just as dull and dry as theirs, she noted, but their papers sat in heavy stacks in straight lines across the table. Sylvia looked again at her own table, with its wreck of displaced files and folders, and began bouncing her leg again. She knew she should trust Vivian. She knew Vivian had her best interests in mind.

But the thought nagged at Sylvia: What kind of person enters this line of work?

Then again, Sylvia mused, what kind of person needs a trial?

Suddenly, a small brown door behind the Judge's desk cracked open and an even smaller, stocky man shuffled through. Vivian's eyes darted up at the sound and she immediately laid the packet on the desk in front of her, her eyes following the man as he made his way to the center of the courtroom. Vivian turned to Sylvia and whispered, "Now, stand when I do." Sylvia nodded. Finally.

Along with the uneasiness Sylvia had been feeling in the lead up to the trial, she now felt a twinge of fear in her gut. She hadn't cared about something like she cared about the outcome of this trial in a long time. She knew, logically, that it was silly to be nervous. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen whether she sweat about it or not.

But no matter how much logic Sylvia's brain threw at the anticipatory anxiety swelling in her stomach, she couldn't shake the fear of what could happen if she lost.

"All rise," the little man started with his palms outstretched in front of him. Sylvia had never been to court before and didn't have a clue how normal court proceedings worked, but she followed Vivian's lead to stand, peeling her satin dress from the back of her sweaty legs.

As the little man took off with his dull opening remarks, Sylvia took a half-glance over her shoulder at the room behind her and nearly jumped when she saw how many people had filed into the rows of seats behind her. She didn't recognize a single one of them as they stood, eyes forward on the little man, dressed in a bland pallet of dark blues and blacks. Sylvia glanced down at her green dress and wondered if she should have gone with something more subtle.

When Sylvia turned back to face the bench, the Judge had already entered and was making their way to the large desk in the center of the room. Sylvia leaned forward and squinted her eyes, trying to get a better look at them. All she could make out past the thick black robe were two, thin black eyes and a long, pink mouth that curved down on the sides.