From dust unto dust

After all the appeals, all the claims of innocence, I am still here. People took one look at my sobbing, screaming face and thought yes, she deserves to die.

And for what? To make amends for another death. An eye for an eye and the entire world is blind to the fact that I didn't do it!

I didn't eat my last meal. I, a person who has never been religious in my life, I prayed. I prayed for some divine being to stop the proceedings, to swear this was all some terrible mistake. If life is fated, then somewhere out there someone has decided that I have lost the right to live. What minor deity did I manage to piss off so much that everything I said could be and was used against me? Why was this even happening?

They are coming to take me away. Several people that, though they wore uniforms and not robes, seemed skeletal reapers all the same. 

Last words, they are asking for last words. I try to think up something beautiful, something that could be quoted. Nothing. I try a fact instead.

Did you know that five percent of all those on death row are innocent? They did not. The needle goes in. 

I am the five percent, I tell them. Then I die, I suppose, or cease to exist. 

What was her crime? One guard asks another. 

Don't know, is the reply, must have been right terrible, though, to deserve this.

The mortician takes the body, and all is done.

The exoneration is given to the corpse five months too late.