The Trial 

T.S. Hand

She gave monumentally bad head and it took him forever to come, though he eventually did gurgle out thick, desperate floods. To repeat, alarmingly bad head (Exhibit A). He considered this along with the fluffy blonde down on parts of her nape (Exhibit B) and stomach (Exhibit C), which ex facie suggested she had lied about her age. As he washed beneath his foreskin in the hotel sink it dawned on him that she was some father’s little princess, a fresh entry into the club scene with a fake ID and probably no more than 17 years under her belt. The realization swept over him like a sentence.

He wandered aimlessly about the eighth floor and felt touched by its symphony of lives behind numerous identical doors. He wondered how many behind those doors had been shanghaied into mouth-fucking a minor. He imagined the knocking of gavels and the swish-swish of orange-bootied inmate shoes.

He made his way to the lobby in a flurry of resolution. Being an adult—he ruminated as he walked into the hotel bar for the second time that night—means dealing with the consequences when you fuck up. He had fucked up (abysmally) and now he would atone. He scoped the bar for the burliest corn-fed Midwestern football fanatic he could find, hopefully one who exuded previous martial arts training. Approaching his target from behind, he slapped this blue-blooded ox of an Amerkan in the back of the head, hard, and quipped, “Look a’ this lil’ faggot.”

There was quick action, the kind that required tenfold longer to explain than to observe. At first, no one understood why the jumbled and leaking heap on the floor had scarcely thrown a punch, had actually only demanded more malicious manslaughter through clenched teeth with acerbic haranguing, (“Come on, you fucking terrorist!”) and had forthwith writhed on the black-checkered tile in a maudlin mess of whimpers and sinister sniggers.  

But this was all easily explainable—reasoned the bar patrons seriatim, after mulling it over and swishing it around in their pint glasses. After all, how often have we seen someone get a little brave, boastful, flammable? And how often have we seen a drunk ignite like a tinderbox and devolve into a beast?

And one by one, the stool-sitters and nut-munchers deliberated until their mind had dotted the “i”s and crossed the “t”s of the snafu’s unfolding, arriving finally at a satisfactory explanation they could take home to their wives or coworkers as proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they were “good men.”

But why,—and this singular fact, forgotten by most, continued to bother the blue-blooded ox accomplice until he would find his own atonement involving a ball-peen hammer, two underutilized fingers on his right hand and most of the knuckles on his left—why, in all the depraved, sick lunacies of the motherfucking free world, why had the instigator chomped down expectantly on two Amethyst Hotel matchbooks—like someone getting dental X-rays—just before the first punch described an arc that terminated at the sinewy part where his jaw met his ear?