Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

In the mirror, she still saw bits of her mother, except her mother had been white, and for that reason, Saffy would always resemble her father to everyone else. When people asked where she was from—no, where she was really from—Saffy would tell them. My father is from India. No, I’ve never been. Yes, I’d like to go someday. And every time, she would feel an exhaustion that reached her very bones.

Ansel was no evil genius. He did not even seem particularly smart. From across the table, the brilliant psychopath she’d hounded all these years looked to Saffy like an unremarkable man, aging and apathetic, bloated and dull. Some men, Saffy knew, killed from a place of anger. Others killed from humiliation, or hatred, or depraved sexual need. Ansel was not rare or mystifying. He was the least nuanced of them all, a murky combination of all the above. A small and boring man who killed because he felt like it.