“Jewels” by C. Dale Young

A new story by faculty member C. Dale Young appears online in Waxwing:

Jewels

That Carlitos had killed his brother was never in dispute, but what the Court could not decide was whether or not it was premeditated. It is difficult to believe a thirteen-year-old boy could plan his own brother’s death. Not even Carlitos could tell you with any certainty whether or not he had planned the whole thing. What the Court knew was that one afternoon, a very ordinary afternoon, Carlitos struck his brother Pedro in the back of the neck with a branch, a branch with a sharp enough spike to puncture the carotid artery. That his brother fell to the ground in the front yard with blood squirting from his neck, each beat of his heart propelling the blood across the dying grass in a thin arc, was never discussed. Not even the court knew these additional details of the death. What it knew was that Carlitos struck his brother in the neck and killed him. The blood pulsing, the dying grass, Carlitos standing there holding the branch as if he were paralyzed, the sun disappearing from the sky then twilight and shimmering, the way he kept yelling at his brother to get up, to stop this crap, to stop it, get up: the court knew none of that.

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