Beneath All [Micro-Fiction]
Courtroom lights flared as Eli Moren took his place. By dawn, his octogenarian insurgent client inside of a rented twenty-something's skin stood frozen like a defiant statue. This wasn’t just another hush-money deal. These were ghosts incarnate, souls refusing to submit.
He’d built a career burying scandals in offshore accounts, bartering secrets in wire transfers, but defending an Astro-projected spirit of a man who 'hijacked' a body for an illegal underground fight club? That was new territory. It's an abysmal world when an eighty-year-old's soul outruns death in new tissue and blood using borrowed muscles, turning them into a prison. The old man sat stoically as Judge Harrow’s gavel hovered over the bench.
On her bench lay a tarnished silver pocket-watch, its face fractured into fractals. It belonged to elder's ringleader—a grandfather who’d cheated mortality on battlefields. Now its hands ticked backward, measuring the moments until reintegration.
“You understand the stakes, Mr. Moren?” Judge Harrow’s voice rasped like gravel in a garbage disposal.
He did. Next to him, the fighter’s jaw twitched beneath young flesh. Eli could almost hear the man’s true voice wrapped with eight decades of regret buried under someone else's body.
Infrared feeds bled red traceries across marble floors. Witnesses flickered between substance and phantom: half-formed words spilling like static from confessionals, motel rooms, abandoned cells. Guilt bled through every seam as whispers whirlwind throughout the courtroom.
Then the verdict swung: reintegration and one month in jail, but in solitary confinement. The ruling wasn’t just about punishment but reclamation. Eli’s breath hitched. He’d defended bodies; now he represented an actual soul.
In the holding cell, spectral static buzzed. The old man pressed a hand to his chest and braced as memories streamed upward: every secret buried, every sacrifice traded away. His body trembled, screaming in recognition.
The pocket-watch, began ticking forward this time. Identity isn’t a prison nor a gift—it’s a pendulum swinging between both.