User blog:LexPetitxVampire/Gavel

Back before all the COVID-19 nonsense went down, I seemed to always been in court, I’m a paralegal, not a lawyer – but I always went to court with the winsome lawyer I worked for. During a rather nasty trial, as it got close to a recess, I excused myself from the gallery and headed to the commodious cafeteria to get a drink before I cough and cause a distraction in the courtroom. The line was ridiculously long thanks to the fancifully dressed oddballs sentenced to Jury Duty, so I opted for the vending machine that was down the same hall as the bathrooms.

I got my drink, and from the bathrooms I heard someone in there having a hard time with their child. I could hear the banging of a toy gavel and smiled – thinking about myself and the lawyer I worked for.

I dreamily floated out of the hallway, picturing our child playing with a little toy gavel. How cute! I heard a toilet flush and I turned around, hoping to see the cute little kid playing judge, but rather what I saw was a judge – dragging behind it the body of a dead person, their head hammered in, standing there in the unflattering light of the courthouse bathroom. The gavel the judge carried was bloody. And for a moment I froze, tiny droplets of sweat trickled down my spine. My mouth opened, but the only sound I was able to make was a strangled gasp.

The hallway door opened and the lawyer I worked for called out to me. The judge turned to look at me, his face looked to have been used as the sound block for a gavel. The judge dropped the body and lurched towards me in a sick fucking way, but I ran for the lawyer I worked for, ran straight into his arms. He seemed taken aback by my sudden hug as I am not the type. “What’s going on, Ruth?” he asked me.

I told him what I had seen, and he believed the wild shit that came from my mouth. He took me into the stairwell which wasn’t too far from where we were and he closed the door quietly. I was happy that he believed me, because I even questioned myself and I was the one who saw the judge! The door to the stairwell opened, the air became as cold as ice as when the gavel began to hit the cement walls, and I closed my eyes, afraid of that gavel bashing my brains in. But the door hid us as when the judge opened the door, we were safe behind it, the lawyer wrapped his arm around me and held me close.

The door closed and we both breathed a sigh of relief. Whoever that judge was is now gone. We went for the door to leave the stairwell but we heard a gavel bang again and our hearts sunk. The lawyer I work for looked up and the judge grabbed him, I watched in horror as the only thing of his that came back down to the ground was his keys.