I know the exact time it happened because I always know the exact time. In my line of work, everything is time-stamped. Every objection, every recess, every lie someone tells under oath while staring at the ceiling as if the truth might be written up there if they look hard enough.
All of it receives a time and a date and my initials, and then it enters the permanent record and nothing about it can be changed afterward, which is the point. October 6th, 7:22 in the evening. That is the precise minute my sister Britt put both hands on my shoulders and shoved me out of a dining room chair and told me to eat on the floor.
My elbow hit the tile first. Then my hip. Then the back of my head, not hard enough to see anything, but hard enough to hear a sound inside my skull like a door closing in an empty house.
The floor was cold. My mother keeps the air conditioning at sixty-eight degrees because Britt likes it that way, and I pay that electric bill. Two hundred and fourteen dollars last month.
I lay there on that tile and I counted the seconds, which is what my brain does in any room where words have been spoken, because six years of stenography trains the clock into your nervous system whether you want it there or not. Second one: my elbow reported its findings to my fingertips. Second two: the laughter started.
Cousin Trey first, the barking nervous laugh he uses when he does not know whose side to pick. Then Aunt Gina, who has always laughed at whatever the loudest person in the room is doing. Then several voices I could not separate because they blurred the way background noise blurs in a courtroom when the jury is shuffling and the judge has not yet called order.
Second three: my mother. Her laugh was different. Small.
Automatic. The particular laugh she has produced my entire life when she has already chosen a side but does not want to be seen choosing. I could pick that laugh out of any crowd.
I have heard it since I was old enough to understand what it meant, which is to say, I have heard it since I was very young. Second four: my own silence. And underneath the silence, my fingers moving against the tile in the steno reflex.
When my hands hear words they type them. They have typed confessions and custody agreements and a man swearing on a Bible that he never laid a hand on his wife while she sat twelve feet away with a cast on her wrist. They type regardless.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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