"You can't run away from your crime any more!"
There was an indescribable silence. Clichés such as a silence so thick it could be cut with a knife simply didn't do it justice. This was a silence so thick it couldn't possibly be cut through with a knife, not unless the blade was edged with diamonds and someone had taken a sledgehammer to the silence first. It was a silence so physical it even had its own colour, or at least its own shade. Various shades of grey, shivering across it, streaked with splashes of red.
The red intensified. She couldn't tell if it was her own vision or whether something had possessed the court, had taken it in its metaphysical grip and was shaking it until the world blurred. She adjusted her glasses, blinked, tried anything to regain her focus, but all she could see was the grey and the black and the red and, in the middle of it all, a pair of white, staring eyes.
Eyes she knew well. Eyes which had followed her, had narrowed in disgust, had tried softening in an illusion of fondness, had been closed when she slid that bloody, bloody button into the silk folds of that costume his eyes had been hidden behind the mask of so many times.
They closed. She thought, for a moment, a moment both ecstatic and horrible, that it was over then. A trail of events she wasn't entirely sure of had finally slammed into a dead end. She would have risen to her feet and run away if her legs weren't shaking harder than a house of cards in an earthquake. Not, of course, that she could feel them trembling. As far as she was concerned they had dissolved forever as soon as she stumbled away from the witness stand. Her limbs hadn't wanted anything to do with her, not when there was a possibility that hanging around would mean that they would spend the rest of their time confined to a cell and the exercise yard.
No. She couldn't move. She couldn't even raise her hands. She could barely breathe. This was the end, she knew.
She couldn't even get that right.
Just as she prepared to fold over into a broken heap, her first eternity of thought, which lasted only a second, snapped into the next. This terrifying new chapter was heralded by a shriek which rang on for the next few years inside her head, and punctuated by more red slicing into the scene. Hands which had thanked her, mocked her, even comforted her for a short while, raked themselves across his face. The red lines multiplied, bit into his skin, again and again. Every time she thought he would pause to catch his breath or wipe away the trickles of blood already seeping towards his neck the scream only intensified, the hands only hurtled themselves into a fresh frenzy. His mouth twisted into a grotesque rictus of every negative emotion one would care to name, as those hands still clawed one word out of his throat.
"Guilty!"
The blood was beginning to smear now. It stained his face, his hands, his arms. The scene was nothing but red and those eyes.
Someone led him away. She didn't see who, or how he reacted. That was if he was even able to react any more, to do anything other than gouge raw strips of flesh from his own body while repeating that one word. All she was aware of was that the insidious colour bled away. In its place was a pure, unblemished white.
It was the shade of a new beginning. She tried to tell them that, when they addressed her again, but she knew she would never translate the past few years and their effect into words. She never was a story teller.
"I felt like I had finally been saved," she said. She smiled, honestly, and the relief painted colour back into the world, but no one asked her from what she had been saved. She couldn't have told them herself.
The only thing she could have said, with any degree of certainty, was that it all began with a Shoe.