I had a dream that I was on death row for a crime I obviously didn’t commit! I was to be executed at 8am on the following morning. They let me out to have a last night on Earth.

I discovered a little-known law: If I could collect 100 signatures on a petition, I could get my sentence commuted to life imprisonment. I was like “100 signatures in 24 hours? NO PROBLEM! I easily know that many people.”

My parents had picked me up from the jail, so I told them to collect signatures from the neighbors and stuff while I went to the co-ops.

I had a hard time finding 100 people! Also, my parents were apparently having a hard time with the neighbors. They were suspicious of letting a convicted whatever-I-had-supposedly-done not face justice. They signed, but my mom had obviously cashed in quite a bit of favor to get them to do so.

After I found all the people I could, I started kind of running around at random. I found some Christian groups on the Diag that were handing out ice cream and talking about Jesus. I convinced them that Jesus wouldn’t want people put to death, so they signed.

Finally, my parents and I compiled our lists. 105 signatures. If there were no repeats, and they were all valid, I could live. Not a large enough margin for my tastes. And not enough time! I sent my mom to the governor’s office while my dad and sister drove me to jail. I hoped that my mom could get the paper turned in in time.

At the jail, while we were walking up to it, there was a sudden rush of flame, as though igniting previously-spilled gasoline. It went in a straight line toward the jail, climbing the wall, and finally exploding dramatically when it got to where my cell had been, on the 8th floor. I looked over. My sister had obviously planned this as a jailbreak, so as to leave nothing to chance.

But I didn’t want my whole family to have to live as fugitives, so I decided that no-one could know that my sister had planted that. Hopefully we could play it off as an accident. I decided to try to help put out the fire. Perhaps I could get time taken off of my sentence (if the petition went through), and I also hoped to plant evidence that the fire and explosion were an accident.

Finally, my mom arrived.

“Mom! Mom! Did you get the petition turned in at the governor’s office? Did they accept it?”

“Nope,” my mom said, pausing dramatically. “Instead, we got the death penalty repealed!”

And everybody lived happily ever after, or in jail for a long time, respectively.