THE Martinez couple got back home from another court session. Which didn’t seem to have gone well.
Carl slumped on the living room sofa, dropping a sigh. And June walked over to the fridge to get some cold water.
Then Carl lay there and watched his woman gulp down glasses of fluid.
He gazed at her for a small time, then he blurted his mind.
“Why does it seem like we’re running on a spot?
“It’s frustrating enough that we’re up against a monster. And now it seems we’re losing, too!”
June took a glance at him.
“Of course!” nodded Carl. “Last November we were holding the joker card.
“But now we seem more like the joker! What exactly is happening?”
Well, that question seemed more fitting for June to ask. She was the psychomicide victim, after all.
But then Carl asked the question anyway. He seemed to have reached his wits’ end.
Truly, Cannon’s legal team had hurried with the autopsy on the late witness Lucius Barnabas, in November of the previous year.
They’d tendered the report in court at the hearing that followed the murder that week.
The court had adjourned twice since then. And today it nullified Barnabas’s statement on psychomicide.
For Cannon provided an autopsy and more statements that suggested a case of psychological instability due to hard drugs.
So, Carl asked the question again. “June, what is wrong? Tell me; what aren’t we doing right?”
He talked some more. “Or, do you want me to drop the suit, so you can heal faster.
“You are what matters to me, not Cannon’s fall!
“You’ve being re-living the trauma the whole time. I can’t watch you hurt more!”
June emptied the last glass of water, put down the tumbler and went to sit beside him.
Carl sat up and listened to her.
“We are not losing, my husband. We are not losing.”
Carl looked at her and thought of her. She used to be faster with talk, faster in her manner of speaking.
June used to talk without picking her words so slow. And was a little faster to respond, too.
Yes, she’d often called him “Carl,” and then she used the Spanish form “Carlos.”
But now she was calling him, “My husband.”
June seemed to be maturing. She was getting introspective. Still Carl was sure she wasn’t fine. That this wasn’t her.
“You know I heard this from a friend at Cannon,” the lady said.
“The friend is a playwright, so she called me to see some of her plays.
“When I saw them, I realized that the dramas seemed to give me a kind of rest at the end.
“I feel very relieved by seeing the end.
“Still her stage plays do not have suspense that makes you hold your breath.
“But at the end, I would feel like I’ve been running the whole time, and then I was resting.
“So I asked her about it. And she told me this thing:
“That poetic justice is hope. That it is healing.
“Then I told her I was not sick and wasn’t hopeless, so how come I got relieved from her poetic justice thing?
“She replied and said I should have asked what ‘poetic justice’ means, in the first place.”
Carl put in. “I was about to ask that, too.”
June picked up. “Let me just use her words to describe it:
“First, she said that the idea has its root in literature. Particularly in plays and novels.
“But she explained it with illustration from everyday.
“So, this is what she said: That if a person falls because she is pushed, and she gets wounded...
“Then her family will expect her healing to begin from getting her wounds treated—”
“Of course, that’s what should be done,” said Carl.
“But my friend said that that treatment is minor. That the healing from that kind of treatment won’t do.
“Why? She said as long as her attacker roams free, she will not feel better.
“But when her assailant is made to go through the same fall she went through, she said that is poetic justice.
“So she said I must have felt for her major characters, and their poetic justice must have relieved me, too.”
Carl was thinking. “So you want Cannon professors to suffer psychomicide, too?”
“No, Carl; I want Cannon to fall like I did! That’s my poetic justice and that’s healing for me!”
Carl went quiet after June’s words. He found himself asking more questions.
But those questions weren’t ones he could ask aloud. Still, he asked them all the same. For he questioned June’s path to healing.
He held his spouse’s hand, and talked.
“This poetic justice thing is okay, June, only when you ain’t the one fighting...
“Only when we ain’t fighting 2 years in court!
“I agree with the playwright you met at Cannon. ‘Poetic justice is healing.’ Yes, I agree.
“But I think you smiled because you saw the justice play out...
“It’s different thing when you’re planning it out!
“So that got me thinking: We’re 2 years still fighting the bully, but you ain’t getting better!
“Do I lose you to beat Cannon? Then what is that to me?
“But you desperately want Cannon down—
“What if that didn’t happen? Does it mean we go downer if it stands?
“Then if Cannon falls flat, will this really heal you?”
June bowed her head and dropped a sigh. Then she looked up again and crossed her arms.
“Baby, listen up,” Carl nudged her. “You know there’s a reason why we say writers are like gods with their characters.
“Because you entrust your care for justice in their hands...
“And when they punish evil and it satisfies you, you call it poetic justice?
“But this isn’t a movie or another theater show.
“We’re dealing with a real monster. And I’m watching you hurt in front of me!
“I think it’s time I left Cannon to God Almighty! I’d better hand them to God, and we move on!”
June was fast. “We leave them to chance, that’s it? How will we move on that way?!
“Aw, why will you bring up God now? Like you’re into stuff like that!
“Are you trying to make me look like the bad person here?
“You were the one who wanted us to sue those idiots. So why’re you blackmailing me with God!
“You believe in God, and I do. We go to church every Sunday, too.
“But is it like ‘let God do the fight – amen-amen, hallelujah’!? C’mon, don’t bring the Bible into this!”
Carl stopped at that moment. He didn’t want to appear religious and lose his grab on logic.
He felt rather embarrassed that he talked about leaving things to God.
He thought it was leaving it to chance. So he felt he was losing it also.
That day Carl and June were close to finding themselves. And then justice that’d beat their own plans.
But then again, they went back putting their cart before the horse.
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