"A Jury of His Peers" by Julie McClement — Our March 2022 Bronze Medal Winner

Julie is our third place winner from the contest posted in our March 2022 issue!

What the judges had to say:

“Tension and climax are deftly used to carry readers deeper into the source of the protagonist’s sorrow. This author manipulates the image prompt to give rich and fulfilling background to the story.”

“There are some good stand-out lines here...The piece exhibits good tension building...”

“An interesting story...”

Meet Julie

Julie McClement grew up in midwestern Ontario and has studied creative writing at George Brown College. Her work has appeared in Spadina Literary Review and Funny Pearls. She can be found on Twitter at @JulieMcClement.

A Jury of His Peers

the unedited story by Julie McClement

It had been years since she’d been to the barn, Not such a barn at all, really - more of a shack, and even that was stretching it. Grandma had called it “that decrepit old wreck” and told the kids to stay away. But Cassandra had spent her first six years of life in Toronto, and when she’d first seen the red walls with white trim, surrounded by stalks of corn that towered beyond the tips of her outstretched fingers, she’d cried out, “A barn!”

The barn wasn’t red anymore. It was smaller, too, than she remembered. Perhaps its place in her psyche was so monumental that she’d imbued it with commensurate scale. She returned nightly in her dreams to cavernous, black space, to the squeak of the hinges and the creak of her boots on the floor, Cassandra had been sixteen when she’d last entered the barn. She was twenty-five now, and this time, when she stepped inside, would be the last.

Cassandra pressed her fingertips against the wood of the door. It was rough and cool in spite of the humidity. Yellow flowers quivered slightly in the breeze, just a few feet away. She had the impulse to break off the stems and turn them into a bouquet, to be laid inside with reverence. A second later, Cassandra thought better of it. To kill living things was a grotesque way to commemorate a murder.

Cassandra took a breath - slow, shaky. She was fine. She could do this.

Her fingers pushed the door again and it swung gently with a creak - the same creak as before. Cassandra tensed, her fingers curling into her palm’s soft flesh, but a moment later she pushed more, and then, a second more, she stepped over the threshold.

There. Benny had been there. He’d been slumped, his feet pointed towards her, and she’d seen the green residue of freshly mown grass on the soles of his running shoes before the blood. There was no trace of it now on the flat, grey boards. The space was as dull as a corporate boardroom. Nothing left of the yellow police tape, the same yellow as the flowers outside. The tape, too, had quivered in the wind.

Cassandra stared hard at the spot where the body had been, keeping her eyes forced open for so long that moisture began to form in the corners. She had come to the barn to prove that she could. If she was able to stride into the place she found her brother’s body, unflinching and unmoved, then it was finally, really all okay. She was better now.

His hair had fallen over his eyes so gently. It was like something out of the seventies, that hair, and Benny spent more time styling it than she did hers. He had long eyelashes, too, and irises of baby blue that Grandma kept telling girls were “like Newman’s.” Benny never acted as though he knew he was handsome. Cassandra had interpreted his silence as a kind of noblesse oblige to his plain sister.

Gay panic had been the defence’s argument, not overtly stated but insinuated at every turn. Wasn’t it true that Benny had put his hand on the defendant’s thigh? Wasn’t it true that Benny had an anger problem, one to which several teachers had testified? Wasn’t it true that there was reasonable doubt, that evidence pointed to self-defence, that they had no choice but to return a verdict of “not guilty”?

But Benny wasn’t gay. He’d never had a girlfriend, it was true, but not having a girlfriend didn’t make you gay. Benny was taking his time. He was choosy.

Cassandra’s eyes drifted left. That was where - she would not dignify him with a name - that was where the defendant’s shirt button had been, a foot from the body. He claimed Benny had ripped the shirt, sending the button bouncing off the floorboards - no evidence of that. No evidence. It had been a cold-blooded murder.

Cassandra turned and left, back outside to the warmer browns of the field. She’d assumed that the moment she stepped out of the barn for the last time would be a solemn moment, a release of the weight of all that had come before. Instead, she felt tense and feral, a trapped animal on the open prairie. She leaned on the steel of her truck, the blue sky stretching endlessly on above, and slowly, awkwardly, she began to cry.

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