Death by Choice

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You have got to be joking, thought the traveller, his head bowed before the judge’s sentence. The “courtroom” was exactly like the little oden restaurant he dropped into a couple of times a month, and a haze of steam obscured the faces of both the public prosecutor and the lawyers. The judge who had delivered his sentence of Death by Choice was riding piggyback on a woman in a denim skirt. In fact, there was no getting around it: the judge was actually a baby. So what did this baby think it was up to, treating him in this high-handed fashion? The traveller felt half inclined to retaliate with a bit of sarcasm, but he felt constrained by the presence of the woman and held his tongue. He somehow felt he knew her, but he couldn’t put his finger on who she was. He’d met her quite a while ago; that much he was certain of. As for this smart-arse baby, he’d never laid eyes on him before. Babies were absolutely anonymous creatures to him. Whoever it might be, it was only someone’s baby as far as he was concerned. He guessed this particular baby must plan on being a judge some time around the mid-twenty-first century. But why did this poor traveller have to find himself being sentenced by a baby?

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