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Judicial Order

Monica Busch

    “Last night, I ate the whole sandwich. I never do that.”
    Lynn scratched at the cracking two-dollar color on her upper lip. The midday sun beat into the courtroom, glinting off the brass wings of the outstretched eagle hanging from above the witness stand.
    “But you know? I’ve been craving spinach salad, it’s so strange. I’ve been going to to the Proctor Mart a couple of blocks down. Have you ever been there? They’ve got this salad with, um, spinach, pecans, and bleu cheese.”
    Sally, young and rotund, shook her head as she leaned over the wooden box where Lynn was sitting and stroking the pleather belt that held her Glock 17.
    “I’m so hungry,” Sally said.
    Lynn sucked on one of her canine teeth and adjusted her thick, drug-store-black dyed ringlets.
    “Me too.”
    “Do you think the judge’ll be out soon?”
    A small cough came from the only other person in the room, a young blonde girl sitting behind the bar, re-reading the same paragraph over and over on a page halfway through a small paperback.
    Sally and Lynn both turned to look at her. The girl did not look up.
    “Eh, probably,” Lynn said. She lowered her voice.
    “What’s this one?”
    “Restraining order.”
    “Makes sense. Crazy ex-boyfriend?”
    “Crazy uncle. Death threats.”
    “Should be an easy one.”
    “Yeah, I think so.”
    Sally sighed, intimating a return to a normal decibel.
    “It’s supposed to be really nice out today. I’m thinking of heading up to the lake this weekend.”
    “The weather forecast said almost seventy today.”
    “That’s what I heard. My boyfriend’s family has a house up there with jetskis so I was thinking, why not? They won’t be up there until at least the middle of June. It’d be nice to get away.”
    “That sounds good. My sister’s coming down this weekend. We’re going to head up to the mall so she can return some shirts she got for her husband. I’m thinking I might stop and look at the carpets. The one in my bathroom is falling apart.”
    “I haven’t gone shopping in a while. I never have time and then when I do, it’s time to pay rent.”
    “Isn’t that how life works?”
    Both women chuckled.
    A single fly buzzed around the florescent light hanging over the judge’s well. It buzzed and it buzzed, looping the same circle over and over.
    The girl reading put her thumb by the sentence she had read seventeen times and looked up at the black speck.
    She thought that fly would be pretty unlucky if that light wasn’t shielded by murky plastic. It’d be zapped before it knew what hit it. The fly never deviated from its loop. The girl returned to her book.
    On the wall, next to the brass eagle and slightly left of center, hung the words “We who labor here seek only the truth.”

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