Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

You spend twenty-two hours a day in this six-by-nine cell, where you cannot physically see another human being, and Shawna knows this. She is the type of woman who reads romance novels with hulking men on their covers. You can smell her laundry detergent, the egg salad sandwich she brings from home for lunch. Shawna loves you because you cannot get much closer, for the fact of the steel door between you, promising both passion and safety.

Just you wait, honey. Men are wolves, and some wolves are patient.

This was how it always went, wasn’t it? All those women who’d come before her, in caves and tents and covered wagons. It was a wonder how she’d never given much thought to the ancient, timeless fact. Motherhood was, by nature, a thing you did alone.

It started small like that. Trivial, easy to ignore. A grunt from Johnny’s throat, an angry slammed door—a grip of the wrist, a flick on the ear. A palm, playfully smacking her cheek.

Someday, Lavender hoped, her children would wade into the ocean. When they did, they would taste her. Lavender’s love, in a mouthful of salt.

We are all bad, and we are all good, and no one should be condemned to one or the other. But if good can be tainted with the bad that comes after, then where do you place it? How do you count it? How much is it really worth?

Love was a thing that could move you and change you, Saffy knew, a mysterious force that made you different and better and warmer and whole. A delicious smell. Familiar, untraceable. It made her hungry.

Have you ever hurt so badly you lose every last trace of yourself?

In the infinite moment before the landing, before the twist and crack of her knee as it bent sideways, Hazel thought: Love is adoration. Love is a gasp, love is a stretch, love is this.

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.

On Infinity explores the concept of choice. We have billions of potential lives, thousands of alternate universes, running like streams beneath our current reality. If morality is determined by our choices, then we must also consider those other universes, in which we’ve made different ones.

In another life, maybe, Lavender would have turned to face Sunshine, would have let her tongue ask about its own wanting. But this was Lavender’s life, and Sunshine was simply a good friend who knew what she needed—a swaddle, a rocking, the sweet lullaby of skin.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” he said, almost laughing. “Love cannot exist as something pure—the spectrum will always infiltrate. The badness will always sneak in.”

Blue Harrison looked almost exactly like your mother. In that instant, Baby Packer seemed to look up. Calm now, sweet and blinking. As if to say: Finally. You found me.

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.

Forgiveness is flimsy. Forgiveness is like a square of warm sun on the carpet. You’d like to curl up in it, feel its temporary comfort—but forgiveness will not change you. Forgiveness will not bring you back.

The night was an open sore. The heart was an organ that beat on and on. The trees creaked their unanimous sorrow.

“He won’t be alone?” Lavender said. “He won’t be alone,” Blue told her. “I promise.” 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.

So it was not you who told the story—instead, that little boy. He possessed you, in the indignity of the interrogation room, eleven years old with sorry doleful eyes. You spoke to make the little boy happy. You spoke to set him free. As you sealed your own fate, there seemed an exquisite pain in the knowledge. There would be no release.

There would be no story, for these girls alone. There would be no vigil, no attention at all. They are relevant because of Ansel and the fascination the world has for men like him.

You don’t need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.

There are millions of men out there who want to hurt women—people seem to think that Ansel Packer is extraordinary, because he actually did.