Narrative Challenge

The challenge: Write a narrative explaining why the characters listed below find themselves in a hall outside a courtroom. Spend no more than 25 minutes.

The Characters:
an attorney
a physician
a teacher
a police officer
a nurse
a professor
a judge

I spent about 20 minutes writing this, because I reached a certain point and decided it was a good spot to end. I took a few liberties with the challenge; not everyone is in the hall, though they are all visible from there. I also changed the nurse to an EMT because it fit better with the plot, limited as it is. Here is what I came up with; feel free to share your own responses to the challenge.

Time to Kill

Marshall McLann paced anxiously outside the doors to the courtroom. As the defense lawyer in the upcoming murder trial, he felt somewhat prepared, but he could never seem to get a jury to agree with his point of view, no matter what it was.

In this case, nearly all of the evidence implicating professor Scott Miller in the murder of Nancy Bordon, a fellow teacher, was circumstantial. Marshall had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that, due to his bad luck with juries, Miller was pretty much doomed from the start.

He snuck a peek into the witness room a a young Indian woman slipped in. She was one of the witnesses for the prosecution - one of the EMTs on scene when Bordon's body was discovered. The only other two witnesses in the room so far were a burly police officer who had also been one of the first responders and an elderly physician who had tried to save Bordon's life after she was rushed to the hospital.

Marshall opened his briefcase, pulling out a folder and staring at a picture of the grisly scene where Bordon was found. Her beaten and mutilated body was strewn across the crisp orange and brown leaves like so much garbage. He sighed under his breath, steeling himself for a long, uphill battle.

Finally the courtroom doors swung reluctantly open with an ominous creek, and Marshall looked up. His attention was only barely captured by the sight of the defendant being led in, handcuffed between two guards who dwarfed the man in the middle. Instead he focused on what lay directly ahead of him, as though daring him to enter the room and even try to get Miller acquitted - the judge's seat. Judge Huron, as per Marshall's luck, was known for being strict and unusually bad-tempered.

Steeling himself one final time, Marshall ignored the stares of the others in the room and marched solemnly to his place in the front. It was time.