Jessica Knoll

What people forget, or rather what the media decided muddied the narrative, is that although The Defendant would go on to represent himself at his murder trial, he was never a lawyer.

felt my face go slack. I swayed, made woozy by that word. Not rape; that I could handle. Technically, I could not. “Sheriff Cruso doesn’t like to upset me, apparently.”
Carl told me then what was done to Denise with the Clairol hair mist bottle she’d purchased just the week before. In the beauty aisle at Walgreens, Denise had hand-selected the object that punctured the lining of her bladder and caused a fatal internal bleed, saying, I heard Clairol holds up better in the humidity than White Rain. I covered my face with my hands, thinking about what Denise looked like when she was in pain. The year before, she’d stepped on a nail in the basement on her way to pull out the Christmas decorations. It went through her shoe, and one of our sisters, premed, had propped Denise’s leg on an overturned milk crate and told her to turn her face away. I remembered the way Denise had clasped my hand and looked up at me, still wearing the Santa Claus hat she’d discovered among the ornaments and fake pine garlands. Her lower lip was quivering, and I saw what she must have looked like as a little girl when she fell off her bike. I stifled a sob now, seeing that face, imagining how much more this would have hurt.
“He should fry,” Carl said, real hatred in his voice, “for what he put her through.”
I hiccupped once, loudly and excruciatingly, and swallowed the bile that came up with it. It was indigestible, all the methods humans had devised to inflict more suffering.

Denise may not have lived long”—I swallowed and tasted the salty fruit salad languishing in my gut—“but she still managed to leave her mark on the world.”