Sometimes I’ll get my story ideas from the darnedest places. Flipping channels, my luck is to catch the end of a show I would have watched had I bothered to pay attention to the television schedule. Such was the case for this short-short.

One reliable thing about TNT is that there’s a chance of finding an episode of “Law and Order” on. The last scene of the episode – Savages – involved the judge taking a vote from the jurors about whether or not they supported the death penalty for the defendant. Here’s the short-short that resulted:

Two Words:

“I do.”

When he first said those words at the wedding to his wife-to-be only a few years ago, they were heavy with hope, heavy with love. He meant it for life.

The last time he said those words, the last of the twelve jurors to do so, they weighed on him with sadness, weighed on him with hate. He had voted to end a man’s life.