Her Place by Dan Bieger

(3 ratings) Rate this Story (5 best) 1 2 3 4 5

SUMMARY: Entry for October Flash Fiction Contest

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury,
The County Attorney wants you to believe this woman comes from a very dark place, a place unlike any that you and I have experienced, a place where no normal human being could have developed. Criminally insane, that is his message to you, the message he has attempted to make the only explanation possible for an act she may or may not commit.
A dark place.
What does that mean?
Does it mean what the County Attorney infers, a place of un-enlightenment, a place of no moral or spiritual values, a place you and I have never been to?
Let us go along with our County Attorney. Let us conceive of this darkness he invokes; let us visit this place, this place where no normal human being could have developed. Meaning you and I and him, for we are normal people, are we not?
Let us, instead, investigate these questions for ourselves. Remember the first night we left our own bed to crawl in with our parents? Why was that? What place were we running from?
Remember all the nights before we finally asked or were finally asked to our very first dance? What was that place we occupied? The one with the cold sweats, the terror of facing the next school day, the thought of meeting someone face to face to ask or be asked and what if that someone was not the someone it should be?
Were they dark places?
Remember the time we came from home school with the note to our parents summoning them to the principal's office. What was that place we found ourselves, holding the summons, knowing it for what it was, knowing what was going to happen at home and then at school and then, again, at home?
What if we turned the light on those places? What if we went back to each of those places and removed the shadows, because shadows are the dark places we carry around with us all the time. We never lose those shadows. Some, like the ones that drove to our parents bed, become less dark. Because our parents lit them away.
Like the first invitation to the first dance. It became lighter, made it easier for the second and the third to the nth occurrence. The shadow went away. Or did it? Was it the same shadow or a new shadow that arrived with the days before the Prom? It felt the same but was it the same? Has the shadow gone from our lives or is it just waiting the proper ambiance to reappear?
What are these shadow places? These darknesses?
Use the case at hand to discover an answer. The Defendant grew up alone, a prisoner, her only contact with other human beings her captors. When she had her nightmares, there was no bed to crawl into, no arms to crawl into, no safe place waiting for her to crawl into.
When she ached for companionship there was no dance to salve her need. There was no boy to ask or to not ask, just a captor to demand, always demand.
You and I and the County Attorney, we learned the only safe place is with another human being, in a human relationship. The only remedy to shadows is comfort; the only comfort comes from another human being who knows the shadows as well as we do.
The darkness is being alone.
Sometimes we think that death is a dark place.