Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

Lavender knew, then, that the world was a forgiving place. That every horror she had lived or caused could be balanced with such gutting kindness. It would be a tragedy, she thought—inhumane—if we were defined only by the things we left behind.

Saffy is grateful for her crow’s-feet now, for the lines wrinkling around her mouth. See? she wants to tell Corinne. You don’t need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.

This, right here, is all she needs. A good fight. The only one.

it could be the humidity, or that ill-fitting suit, or the thing her mother’s eyes do when they first catch sight of Hazel. They snag, widen. A brief flicker of hope cools into disappointment. In that bottomless millisecond, her mother sees two daughters. Hazel is always the wrong one.

He gets the attention. He gets the media, the discourse, the carefully regulated procedure. Real punishment would look different, Hazel knows—like a lonely, epic nothing. A life sentence in a men’s prison, the years rotting as they pass. The long forgetting of his name. A heart attack or a slip in the shower, the sort of faceless death he deserves. Instead, Ansel has been given this noble sacrifice. Martyr status. Hazel

But Hazel will never be just herself again: Jenny reveals herself in a flare, a lurch. Jenny smirks in the curve of Hazel’s jaw. She hides in the crease of Hazel’s eyelid, lingers in the divot above Hazel’s lip.

She is a scent, fleeting. A whiff. A glimmer. Jenny is in the oxygen that fills Hazel’s lungs, she is in the stubborn clench of Hazel’s fist. As Hazel peers through the glass and into the execution room, Jenny winks out from her own reflection. This, Hazel knows, is the miracle of sisterhood. Of love itself. Death is cruel, and infinite, and inevitable, but it is not the end. Jenny exists in every room Hazel walks through. She fills, she shivers. She spreads, dispersing, until she is nowhere—until she is everywhere—until she lives wherever Hazel carries her.

You pray. In the next life, you hope you will be reincarnated as something softer—something that understands the innate sort of longing that makes a being whole. A graceful creature. Hummingbird. A dove.