Written for the Sunday Six Sentence Story prompt from Girlie on the Edge, where the prompt word is “swing.”
The courtroom had gone so quiet that Mark could hear the blood moving through his own ears, a soft and endless rushing, like the sound inside a shell.
Mark had sat on a half dozen juries before this one, had voted to convict four times, and not once had he felt the verdict leave his body the way this one had, like something extracted rather than decided.
Across the aisle, the defendant — a boy, really, twenty-two and hollow-eyed — gripped the edge of the table as though the floor beneath him had already begun to tilt.
He thought of his own son, around the same age as the defendant, and the way he sometimes looked at Mark like he was already somewhere else, and hated himself for thinking it.
The judge lifted the gavel, and in that fraction of a second from when she started her swing just before wood met wood, Mark saw the whole terrible mathematics of it: one family would walk out of here and begin, slowly, to heal, while the other would simply cease to exist in any way that mattered.
The gavel fell.
Image conjured using Gemini.
Facts, Fictions & Fantasies 
