Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

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

There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone. The good is simply the stuff worth remembering. The good is the point of it all. The slippery thing you have always been chasing.

He is savage and monstrous, yet somehow appealing. He is your next-door neighbor, your high school classmate, the man in the seat at the end of the bar. He is a mastermind, an expert liar, the last person you’d ever suspect. He hides his evil beneath his wit and his charm. Maybe this is why we love him: because he could be anyone.

The consequences of murder are continually overshadowed, upstaged by the banal shock value of murder itself. And the devastating ripples of violence reach infinitely further than the victims themselves, to their mothers, sisters, friends, and communities, while the Ted Bundys of the world dominate the headlines every time.