Jan
25
In later years she would remember the courtroom as being made entirely of wood: floor, walls, ceiling, judge’s stand, benches she had to remind herself weren’t called pews. All wood, and there was an American flag. It would be nice to say they walked in children and walked out no longer quite, that there died their innocence and coalesced their nascent maturity, but it would be inaccurate. When parts of you grow up too fast, other pieces stagnate, struggling to develop like flowers under insufficient light. When they stepped back onto colorless linoleum they carried one more thing and worried about one less, and that was all.
