Jury Duty Questionnaire
by Jadzia Santiago
After “A Field of Onions: Brown Study” by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal
- I fill out the questionnaire in the hall bursting with tired people. I will be free to go when my name is read from the list, when I have lifted my body and the hardship bursts through me, a quick, shaky disqualification.
- To check: Sex, race, grudges. The lawsuits piled by front doors. That is where it says to put the boots.
- On the sidewalk, a nineteen-year-old is beaten by the police into the shape of a monthly government check. This is my uncle. Years later, a woman flies from the hood of a squad car and lands in the same spot, arm dangling, snapped in two. This is his mother.
- Question: Would you be less likely to believe the testimony of a law enforcement officer simply because of his or her job?
- Answer: SANTIAGO vs. CITY OF NEW YORK, et. al. If the award was several thousand dollars, twice, how many soles were on the ground?
- To ruin a life is to crush its potential; to break; to stain.
- Could you forget the crimson sound of the screams, hypothetically? The family takes the subway to the courthouse, through those uniforms swarming on the platforms. Hear the crunches, echoing.
- Uncle at his mother’s funeral: insisting he is next in his ramblings and undone tie. For now, he works nights at the stadium and walks around as if lost.
- Good morning, grandmother carrying her groceries, bags of rice and beans. Heal, you struggling teenager. Not you. I know the color of your bloodied face.
- Solution: black rubber.
- My father says, The only benefit to Mamí being dead is that the NYPD doesn’t get to kill her.
- Your tío always wanted to go to school, you know, but he missed a lot because none of us could ever take him. He was very smart, before.
- Natural death is a method of resisting arrest.
- I think about a teenage boy walking on the broken concrete, before slipping and falling into a void he can never return from. Right now, he thinks of life as an expanse of hope. Step, crunch. Step and crunch. Right now, he is a grain of rice in a grocery bag. Right now, the world gives way underneath him like the weight of his body means something.
- Afterward, at least four officers take off their boots by their front doors — at least four pieces of exposed white bone.
- The tips of government laces, tied bureaucratic knots, red-stained windshield. A family tree, an axe.
- There are multiple forms of bias that have the same justification: blood.
- And even if I could put this all aside, these questionnaires are marked for their destination solely by color.
- Your Honor: I remember the blood on every pale sidewalk stained. I am a bruise darkening. I request to be dismissed for this reason.