Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

The chaplain watched you with a stark sort of pity—you have always believed that pity is the most offensive of feelings. Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.

We Are All Rabid. You smile every time you see it—it is so bizarre, so nonsensical, so unlike the other prison graffiti (mostly scripture and genitalia). There is a quiet truth to it that you would almost call hilarious, given the context.

She signed the letter Blue. Her real name is Beatrice, but she was never Beatrice to you or anyone who knew her then. She was always Blue: Blue, with her hair braided and flung over one shoulder. Blue, in that Tupper Lake Track & Field sweatshirt, sleeves stretched anxious at the wrists. When you remember Blue Harrison, and your time in the Blue House, you recall how she could never walk by the surface of a window without glancing nervous at her own reflection.

She was seventeen years old. She knew what it meant, to bring life into the world. The gravity. She knew that love could swaddle you tight, and also bruise. But until the time came, Lavender did not understand what it meant to walk away from a thing she’d grown from her own insides.

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

The look Johnny gave her then. The frustration did not belong on his face—it was the kind of ugly that must have originated inside Lavender herself. I’m sorry, Lavender wanted to say, though she did not know what for.

Manifestos are for crazy people, you explained slowly. Manifestos are incoherent, scrawled hastily before pointless acts of terror. Your Theory is more an exploration of the most inherent human truth. No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.

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?

You could not have seen how that tiny decision would catapult you into the future, directly onto this concrete floor. How your actions would become a chain, marching purposefully into the present.

You’ll know it when you feel it, her mother said then. The right kind of love will eat you alive.

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.

He shrugged. “You know what I mean. You know what it’s like, to be left all alone. The sound itself can make you want to hurt things.”

You know, from a lifetime of this place, that the screaming is a sound no one else can hear, that it is meant for you alone.

What was going through your head? You genuinely don’t have an answer. You would explain it, if you could. Have you ever hurt so badly, you wish you could ask. Have you ever hurt so badly you lose every last trace of yourself?

He rejects the concept of bodily continuity, the idea that our physical beings make us who we are. Instead, he latches on to memory. Memory as the thing that makes us individual, as the thing that separates my human consciousness from yours. I have this idea. This theory, I guess. There is no such thing as good or evil. Instead, we have memory and choice, and we all live at various points on the spectrum between. We are created by what has happened to us, combined with who we choose to be.

You need her for the plan, and after, you need her to make sure your Theory gets out to the world. She has agreed to leak your notebooks to the press, submit them to publishers. Nothing else matters, as long as she goes through with this.

Morality is not fixed. It’s fluid, ever-changing.

Sometimes you are certain this is all you are made of: a fleeting instant between action and inaction. Doing something, or not. Where is the difference, you wonder? Where is the choice. Where is the line, between stillness and motion?

For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist at all.

“He exhibits all the traits of our perpetrator. Explosive, but not consistently so. Fragile with his masculinity, always trying to prove it. Socially competent enough to avoid calling attention to himself. It makes sense—I’ve seen him before, humiliated. Those animals in the yard, also buried by a creek. He kills in threes, Sergeant.”

“There is a difference,” Moretti said gently, “between believing something is true and having the facts to prove that it’s true. It doesn’t matter what you suspect. It doesn’t matter what you think, unless you build a case that can stand up in court.”

When Saffy yearned now, she did not yearn for the drugs themselves or the high they provided, cheap and flimsy—she yearned instead for the freedom. The knowledge that though she walked a tightrope between life and death, it hadn’t really mattered which way she fell.

It felt like a breath of oxygen, even as she gasped for air—it felt like a younger, freer self, one who cared significantly less about survival. She had missed that danger. She had missed that liberation.

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.

It was only a matter of time. Saffy knew you could not hide your real self forever, no matter how normal you looked; the truth would come out eventually.

You did not care what it meant, that peace came only after violence, and then only sometimes. It felt less like a choice and more like a need—you had to chase the quiet.

Your Theory grew then, expanding, a truth proven as the moonlight jumped off purple amethyst. You can do the vilest thing. It’s not so hard, to be bad. Evil isn’t something you can pinpoint or hold, cradle or banish. Evil hides, sly and invisible, in the corners of everything else.

It’s all in my Theory, you said, grasping. You’ll see, when you read it. Good and evil are simply stories that we tell ourselves, narratives we’ve created to justify being alive. No person is wholly good, and no person is wholly evil. Everyone deserves the chance to keep living, don’t you think?

You have placed your trust in Shawna, a person you severely overestimated—a person who proves the only thing you’ve ever known about women. Always, they leave you alone.

It was easy, from the records. He had been adopted back in 1977, after only a few days in the hospital. A two-month-old baby with a case of malnutrition.

Ansel would be twenty-nine years old now. According to the investigator, he lived in a small town in Vermont—he had studied philosophy in college and now worked at a furniture store. At this, Lavender beamed with pride.

“Blue,” Lavender said. Cheryl rolled her eyes. “Her name is Beatrice, actually, but the locals nicknamed her. She’s a precocious little girl, very empathetic. Last month they found an injured garden snake in a box under her bed—she’d been nursing it back to health.” Cheryl chuckled. “That’s the restaurant. The Blue House.”

There was nothing like the love you had for your own child. It was biological. Primal and evolutionary. It was chronic, unbanishable. It had been living inside her all this time. Bone-deep.

You are a fingerprint. A thumb, pressed firm to an electronic pad. No question: it is you, wiping dust from your eyes with the back of your hand, it is you, tugged forward by the link of your handcuffs, it is you, wearing new white scrubs that smell inexplicably like meat. It is you, stepping across the threshold. It is you, now, in this place they call the Death House.

The future always managed to twist itself, expanding into pliant and inscrutable shapes. The future was a mystery, unknowable. You honestly never considered that the future might come to this. It feels too small, too helpless, for a person like you.

You recognize some obscure corner of that feeling, a desire that makes some raw sense to you now. The desperation is intentional, maybe the most important part of this exercise. It is why they made you wait for years, then months, now hours and minutes, the whole of your life transformed into a countdown. The point is this. The waiting, the knowing, the not wanting to die.

What happened with Jenny? Blue had asked. It was your second week at the Blue House. A sunny day, humid and fragrant. You had spent all morning in the yard sawing lumber, and a trail of sweat trickled slow down your back.

But I think he’s trying to make meaning, and that’s admirable enough. He’s trying to figure out who he is and how to exist.

What exactly are you trying to leave? Shawna asked. I don’t know, you said, irritated. My thoughts. My beliefs. Don’t you think it’s important to know that something of yourself exists beyond your own body? Something that can outlive death?

gone, relegated to a back office at best, a dumpster at worst. A life’s worth of thinking and writing, faded into oblivion. Your eye catches a random page, lying haphazard on the concrete. Morality is not finite, it reads. Morality is not permanent. There is always the potential for change. It seems impossible that such a basic thing—potential—can be taken away.

Even if it ends right here—even if no one listens—there is always the Blue House. The Blue House is your Theory, standing steadfast. The Blue House is proof. You are expansive, like everyone else. You are complex. You are more than just the wicked.

Dear Ansel. My name is Blue Harrison. Before my father was adopted from a hospital near Essex, New York, he had an older brother. I think that brother might be you.

It seemed, then, that the universe was both cruel and miraculous. Spiteful and forgiving. Baby Packer had not been screaming all those years to punish you. He had been screaming like all babies did: to tell you something.

But some cases evolved beyond mystery, into something more crooked, more complex; the worst kind of mystery transcended its own body, transformed into a brand-new sort of monster. Some cases turned cannibal, devouring themselves until there was nothing left but gristle.

Every brain was different in its deviance—human hurt manifested in select, mysterious ways. It was a matter of finding the trigger point, the place where pain had landed and festered, the soft spot in every hard person that pushed them to violence.

“Rachel Harrison was married to Ellis Harrison. They bought the restaurant and had the girl, Blue, when they were really young. He died in 2003. Cancer. I found his school files, a private academy in the city—a guidance counselor noted that Ellis was adopted, so I called the county, checked the records. And guess who had an older brother, from the same case report?”

“Blue wouldn’t necessarily know that. Maybe she invited him there, to ask for help. But how did she find him? And why now?”

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.

The question is how we face what you have done, the chaplain continues. The question is how we ask forgiveness. 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.

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.