Not guilty? by Olena Brahynska

"Not guilty!"said the judge
and banged the gavel. But Theodor, an attorney, knew that his client was a bastard. Despite all the evidence, Theodor managed to salvage him from imprisonment and wealthy drink-driver left the court with an easy mind. He received from the bastard a pretty penny and his heart calmed down.
Theodor came home to his wife and kids. The dinner was served as usual, and they spent the evening in a warm family circle. Theodor highly appreciated late evening hours, because it was the only time he could see his loved ones. The family lived poorly but amicably.
The sun had gone to rest, the moon took its place. The night wrapped the city and its dwellers    retired for the night beneath a starless sky. That night Theodor had the worst nightmare he could ever have.
He heard an eerie crying of a boy. The boy was lying on the road yelling from open bones fractures. Pain and fear were written all over his face and blood ran freely in thick scarlet rivers down his leg before it soaked into his once white football socks. The mud and grit under the boy became enmeshed with raw pink flesh and was spotted with blood. Deafened of the boy's screaming and overwhelmed by the smell of blood and flesh, Theodor started feeling unbearable surge for vomiting. He looked on his hands and found it dirty in warm scarlet blood.
Theodor awakened in a cold sweat. The atmosphere in the bedroom was placid, almost silent. He looked at his hands in the moonlight. The hands were clean, but Theodor felt like it remained dirty in red marking-ink. The wave of helplessness and desperation befell him.
Theodor knew he saved a scum and betrayed his profession. He knew he had done something pretty awful and failed himself. But no-one was going to help his younger brother that painfully suffered from bone cancer and no-one knew that money from the bastard were vital for him. Theodor's family had always been poor, and he always felt himself guilty of that. As a child he was guilty of eating better than his parents, wearing new boots to the school while his mother was wearing patched winter coat and father was killing himself by working as a coalminer. As his family lived in poverty, he was a black sheep at the school. But where there was his fault of being poorer than his classmates and having neither pretty school bags, nor pens and notebooks? Did their classmates know about his duty of taking care of Timmy, his sickly younger brother? Certainly, no. But, to be honest, Theodor always was not a victim of the circumstances, he was a tough soldier. He had been fighting for so long and today...today he was broken down. 
Because of his inability to "be a man" and help his family with money, Theodor had become a partner in crime. The guilt like gasoline started filling his guts. His insides died slowly in the toxicity, needing no more than a spark to set it ablaze. The fire was burning him out so badly that he felt like it would remain nothing but a shell, an outline of a person, and his wife and kids would not recognize him in the morning. He was thinking about his life, responsibilities, his family and Timmy...he recalled the ceremony of graduation from the university...handshaking with the dean...his dreams to be a defendant of justice and being man of his word... Today he had sold his soul and it had left an empty space in his breastplate.
He knew the boy had recovered. He just would remain limp for the rest of his life. But it seemed like Theodor would never be able to breathe again. The bundle of guilt got stuck in his throat. Dry tears stopped in his trachea, and he even couldn't cry them out. The emptiness and darkness of the room absorbed tearless man, and he felt like something an air leak started coming through the hole in his chest.