Things I Know to Be True: A List Story
Angelique Lokeni
1. Cyanide smells like almonds.
2. About 40% of the population does not have the gene that allows them to be able to detect the smell of cyanide.
3. I only know #1 and #2 because someone else told me and ever since then I haven't known what to do with that information so I cope by telling everyone else I know this same information.
4. Most people who stage crime scenes and try to clean it up forget to clean door knobs, sinks, and faucets.
5. I know #4 because my forensic science teacher senior year told my class that those are the first places that crime scene investigators look after a murder scene has been cleaned up.
6. Rigor mortis isn't permanent and usually goes away after 24-36 hours.
7. Crime scene investigators can tell when a body's been moved because of a thing called lividity.
8. Lividity is basically when all the blood in a person's body pools on one side depending on the position they were in when they died. It's essentially a giant bruise on one side of the person's body.
9. My studies in the criminal justice department have burdened me with knowledge of macabre aspects of crime scene processing that I don't know what to do with.
10. The aforementioned things I listed, as well as others not listed here, affect my daily life as I am now constantly paranoid and my anxiety creates all sorts of scenarios based off this information.
11. I can't watch crime investigation shows anymore because I can't stop myself from cringing at how evidence and crime scenes are mishandled in them.
12. You can't dust for fingerprints on plastic wrap taken from drug busts, so you spray it with a compound called basic yellow and take prints from it that way.
13. All new crime lab scientists have to go through a mock trial as part of their new hire process.
14. The mock trial is supposed to be the most difficult trial you ever face so that you're better prepared when you have to testify for real trials.
15. I wanted to work in the lab testing drugs because I liked chemistry. And also so that I didn't have to go to crime scenes because chemists aren't really needed at homicide scenes.
16. But the guy who's in charge of the DNA department in the crime lab told me that everyone rotates going to crime scenes.
17. I'm too emotional and have too good of a memory to be able to go to crime scenes and be able to live a normal life afterwards.
18. I no longer want to work in the crime lab.
19. I still don't know what to do with all the forensic science information stuck in my brain.
20. Thanks to my prior career choices, I could potentially write an incredibly accurate murder mystery series if I wanted to.



Writing a story in list format was really hard for me! I make lists a lot so the idea was really appealing to me, but most of my lists only make sense to me. It was a challenge writing a list in a way that was cohesive and told a story for a reader. I'm not entirely sure that I was even successful in doing that much, but it was a lot of fun anyway! I think that if done right this could definitely be a good alternative format to use for literature. I'm definitely going to play with it a little more, especially in future creative writing classes.

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