The nineteenth of July was to be hot and stagnant. The charred pavement would roast under the Missouri sun, and a haze would set over the world as it had every day before. Everyone moved slowly, resenting the moments that they had to burn under the intense humidity that refused to accumulate into a rhythmic rain.

A man waited, anxious for the day to break; he was the only one looking forward to feeling that sun on his back and the freedom to go wherever whenever he wanted to. Finally, the Innocence Project representatives arrived. They shook his hand again and gave him new clothes to change into.

The shirt was still bright and the jeans still smelled like a department store. Brison hadn’t smelled a department store in twenty-four years.
And that time had not been good to him, he thought as he looked at himself in the mirror.

He shuddered at his reflection: his balding hair, beard, and crooked teeth. He couldn’t stand to be in this place any longer; it made him recall the fear he awoke with and fell asleep with everyday. He was careful about who he trusted and only told three others, in all his years in prison, that he was innocent. Saying something like that, even bumping into someone or making the wrong expression, could get you killed. Everyone knew it; it was just their way of life.

But nothing could take away what Brison knew to be true; he was a free man on the inside. He felt no guilt… no, only regret that someone had raped that young woman and blamed him for it. He was not angry, though. Brison had reflected on his feelings every minute of every day after he learned he was to be exonerated; he had finally decided that he couldn’t be mad. Nothing he felt or thought or wished would take back what had happened, and nothing could bring back the years he had lost in civil Hell.

With a snap and flash from the camera, that moment before his freedom was forever preserved.

He and his family hugged with such passion as they had never done before: all this time of waiting was finally over! Brison couldn’t help but notice their sideways glances, though, couldn’t help but see the trace of worry in their eyes. They wanted to love him, but he wondered if they would ever be able to look at him without thinking of the crime.

He had even started to believe everything the courts and police said. They had changed his own recollection. They had had invariable proof.
His family must have been panic stricken. He was sure doubt had festered in them for these twenty-four years until it seemed that doubt was all they had left.

It wasn’t really over; it would never really be over; it would haunt him his whole life.

But Brison was not one to let reality stop him. He had wasted twenty-four years, and he was not going to waste anymore. Time was his prisoner now.

“Let’s go home, Johnny,” his mother said, her dark eyes full of tears.

“Home,” Brison repeated. “Yes, home sounds very good right now.”



I lifted my pen from the paper momentarily. It was hard to think how he may think, but it made me feel better to write down everything that happened. I didn’t know if what I wrote was truth, but the lies had been clutching my heart with their viny fingers for twenty-four years… and that wasn’t about to change.

I just stared down at the page for a minute. Hadn’t it been stark white just a minute ago? My pen had stabbed black lines into it; the ink could never be erased now. Is the paper really better off after surviving such a violent attack?

No… it was better pure and unloved.
I should have shaken Brison’s hand as he walked out of the prison, told him that I was sorry for pushing his guilt, heard his voice again for the first time outside of a court room. I could have confessed that I was a coward: I wanted someone to pay for the crime, and when I saw him that day in the orange jumpsuit, the hand of the police guiding me felt more like the cold barrel of a gun.
I was supposed to be the victim--not him. I had finally figured out my role in life, playing my cards the way they wanted and blaming the s*** that went wrong in my life on that night. I wasn’t sure I could be me without being the rape anymore. I couldn’t remember myself before it, and I couldn’t see a future without it.
“John Brison,” he said to me with smoky breath underneath the bright porch lights as we both held a cigarette to our lips.
“John Brison,” the police whispered to me as I watched a line of men file in through the door of the interrogation room and line up against the wall.
“John Brison,” the voice through the phone said.
“John Brison,” I said in court, pointing across the room at the black man in the shadow of an orange jumpsuit.
“John Brison,” the jury announced as they read out the sentence that wasted away twenty-four years of his life.
“John Brison,” I whispered in my sleep every night leading up to his exoneration as dreams of the rape plagued me and took away what should have been my only time of peace.
For so many years, the name John Brison stood for a monster who raped me and then talked to me under the bright lights of the night. But that man… he was innocent. I knew it, but I didn’t feel it. He isn’t a man to me anymore, and there’s nothing a ruling can do to change that.
“John Brison,” I think now as I write down everything.
He doesn’t even smoke.
Why couldn’t he have just smoked?