The Body in Question by Jill Ciment

Author:Jill Ciment
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

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“Can’t we have lunch someplace other than Nic and Gladys?” asks Cornrows as the van pulls out of the underground parking lot. “It’s always so fattening.”

“You don’t need to lose weight,” says the church lady.

“I like their fried chicken,” says the alternate.

“Nic’s got a contract with the court,” the deputy explains, pulling up to Nic & Gladys.

While the jury finishes their lunch of fried tilapia with rice and canned corn, C-2 and F-17 step outside for a smoke.

“Should we keep meeting like this? In front of everyone?” she asks.

“If we stop now, they’ll know that we know they know,” he says.

She knows she shouldn’t ask the next question. It’s one thing to have sex with another juror, another to discuss impressions of a witness, but she is so curious to have his take on what she just heard she can’t resist. She asks, “Didn’t Stephana’s laughter sound demonic to you?”

“Her laughter sounded like a release to me,” he says. “I hear that kind of dark humor all the time with my students.”

“That wasn’t dark humor,” she says. “That was morbid.”

“Laughter is a defense mechanism. It helps us cope with the idea of our own mortality.”

“I don’t think Stephana believes she’s mortal,” she says.

Cornrows pushes open the restaurant door, an unlit cigarette between her lips. She opens a fresh book of matches, strikes, and exhales into the sun. “Thank you guys for refusing to finish your lunches,” she says. “Maybe Nic will take the hint and stop with the prison food.”

Does she know? C-2 wonders.

Late that afternoon, the prosecution rests his case, surprising everyone. His last witness, a pontificating police officer who wasn’t even at the crime scene, is only there to refute the defense’s innuendo that Stephana stole her mother’s jewelry. There were two other burglaries in the neighborhood around the time of the fire.

C-2 was expecting the prosecution to close with a motive. Some explanation, no matter how preposterous or simple-minded, as to why the affectless teenager who loved her dachshund set her eighteen-month-old brother on fire. C-2 is always skeptical about the role of causality in human impulses, the way Hollywood reduces a serial killer’s motives to a flashback of a psychotic mother putting out her cigarette on the serial killer’s eight-year-old palm. But to offer no theory? No dénouement?

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