My name is Kevin Blake. I am seven years old, and I live in an apartment with my mother, my father, and Granny.

My mother thinks I should write about our world; she says things haven't always been so good, and they won't stay so good always. I'd rather just write about me, but I guess my mother knows best.

I am writing this for the benefit of Uni-Press, the world-wide newspaper, to acquaint people with my case. You see, I am being tried for murder. I guess I'm special because I am being tried in adult court. Mother says that's one of the many improvements made lately. Now all people of all ages are tried in the same court. Equality, I guess.

Anyway...about what living now is like. It's O.K., I guess. It's clean, anyway. Mother says the air used to be dirty and so did the water. She says trees used to grow wild, and we used to eat animals, like cows. I've never seen cows, except in a zoo. It's an O.K. world, I guess, but my father says I like it because I don't know any better. I must-be lucky I don't know any better.

I should write about Granny. She's awful old. No, she was awful old. It's hard to think of her as gone because as far as I'm concerned she never really existed.

See, Granny wasn't really my Grandmother. She was my Great Grandmother, and she was over 120 years old. We got to keep her because we had only one kid (me) and family units are limited to four. She was my mother's grandmother, and they kept her alive through all sorts of modern miracles that my father calls curses. I used to think he didn't like Granny, but I guess he just didn't like the way she was preserved.

See, Granny couldn't really do much of anything. I mean, it's hard to be close to someone who can't walk, or talk, or see further that ten feet, and just kind of floats around in a thing like an old-fashioned iron lung.

Granny was "living" with us ever since I was born, so I just accepted her as part of the furniture or something. I remember Mom used to sit by her box and read to her. When ever she did this, Dad would turn kind of pale and leave the room. I guess that was because nobody was really sure if Granny could hear or not. She could see, though, and Mom used to wheel her over to the window and prop her up so she could see out, Only trouble was she couldn't see further'n ten feet, and we lived on the 61st floor.

Anyway, that's how things were. I'd get up in the morning and before I'd leave, Mom would have me kiss Granny goodbye on the side of the box. Never really bothered me, course I never really thought about it.

But one day I skinned my knee out on the tri-dimensional playground, so I came home early. My Dad was gone (We were lower middle class, so dad had to work a 20 hour week) and so was my mother—visiting a rich neighbor. (Mom is a nurse, that was why we got to keep Granny at home instead of at the hospital.)

So anyway, I was just horsing around, turning cartwheels and stuff, when I noticed Granny had turned her head and was watching me. I felt really important because she didn't turn her head very often. So I was showing off, kinda, when I noticed Granny looked different somehow. So I went over to her and she was crying! I mean, people ask me, couldn't her eyes have just been watering, but I know they weren't. People don't look that unhappy if their eyes are just watering. I didn't really understand what she wanted until she started flipping her head towards the wall and looking at the socket where her machine was plugged in. As far as I'm concerned, she couldn't have made herself clearer if she'd written it in neon lights, so I walked over and pulled out her plug. I know I did right, too, because before she died, she winked at me and smiled. She still had that smile on her face when she died, and dad told me later that that was the only time he'd ever seen her smile.

So now I gotta go to court. I guess it's gonna go pretty bad for me because I don't deny I did it, and I don't claim to have a diseased mind, I don't really care, though, even if they kill me tomorrow, they can never take away my memory of that smile.

Ann Minor