Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

It didn’t matter that you were a person, and it didn’t matter what you wanted. The bad lived insistently in your blood, a part of you always, calling out like a magnet to the horror of the world.

The very stuff of her. But it was not a love she chose, and for this, Hazel would always resent the part of herself that feared—maybe hoped—that she would never love anyone quite the way she loved Jenny.

They were no longer an us, but rather two separate people, growing at two separate paces, one awake and blazing, the other formless and grasping.

She brought it to her lips. Rolled it into her mouth. The strand of hair tasted like nothing at all—she could only feel the shape of it, firmly existent, a spider on the pad of her tongue.

The universe did not care how you loved. You could love like this—urgent and slippery, like a girlfriend, or a wife. You could love like a sister, or even a twin. It didn’t matter. Two connected things must always come apart.

There is a version of yourself who lost only the things that everyone loses. You like to believe that every alternate self would have found the Blue House, too.

But the most bemusing version of you—the one you cannot reckon with—is the Ansel Packer who did everything the same and simply never got caught.

Memory, Saffy thought, was unreliable. Memory was a thing to be savored or reviled, never to be trusted.

The way death peeled itself deliberately from a bone.

She glimpsed that same craving in Jenny Fisk—an ask, for suffering. It was the scariest thing about being a woman. It was hardwired, ageless, the part that knew you could have the good without the hurt, but it wouldn’t be nearly as exquisite.

This day was about love, but Saffy had always been more interested in power. The black and pulsing heart of it. Power was the clink of her badge against the kitchen counter. It was the heft of the gun at her waist. As she stood at the altar, wind blowing her carefully pinned hair from its bun, as the bride and groom kissed and thunder rumbled in the distance, Saffy wondered about her own internal compass, the needle that kept her on this path, stopped her from wandering or regressing or giving up entirely. It scared her to realize there was no compass. There were only days and the choices she made within them.

As you shoveled the dirt over her limp and useless form, you felt a wide, furious nothing. She was dead, and you were the same, and nothing mattered at all.

You shouldn’t have done it. You were sick and wrong. Most devastatingly, you were unchanged.

When Lavender thought of Johnny now, she could only see the flames.

How would the universe look now, if she had saved her children instead of herself?

She wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand—you both listened to the sound of the row, muted for once, a group of men grieving over something more despicable than themselves.

Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.

The windows had been broken, and afternoon sun streamed through shards of shattered glass.

Grown, transformed, spectacularly new.

Saffy was consistently astonished by Kensington’s mediocrity, how his performance did not matter as long as he flashed that smile, clapped the superintendent on the back like a fraternity brother.

She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside—some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.

Her own regret seemed to wait, pregnant in the ravaged humidity.

It occurred to Saffy that there were many ways to hurt—not all of them physical.

she prayed that the difference between good and evil was simply a matter of trying.

Grief was a loneliness that felt like a planet.

It seemed insane, almost laughable, that one person—Ansel, a single man, so deeply average—had created a chasm so colossal.

Jenny was gone, and now their connection was as primal and elusive as the fluid in which they’d both been formed. It was cellular. It was infinite. Simply, it was memory.

in which Saffy had turned Ansel into exactly the monster she needed him to be.

A small and boring man who killed because he felt like it.

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.

It is a comfort to know that once, you were little enough to be cradled. Once, there was only wheatgrass and wonder, the earth turning ordinary beneath the train of your spine.

Justice is supposed to be an anchor, an answer. She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation.

Death is cruel, and infinite, and inevitable, but it is not the end.

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.