Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

Slick with afterbirth, foamy around the head, the baby was a tangle of furious limbs. In the lantern’s glow, his eyes were nearly black. He did not look like a baby, Lavender thought. Little purple alien.

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.

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.

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

There was a fact about life that Saffy hated, then: how it took the bad things and settled them inside you. 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.

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

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

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.

Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Grief was a loneliness that felt like a planet.

They were a testament to how the brain could skew itself. The many intricate ways that people could be wrong.

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.

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.

How insane, you think. How deranged. The government paid money for this glorified table and placed it in this room. These twelve people woke up this morning, put on their uniforms, and drove to work, just to perform this demented exercise. The citizens of your very own country pay taxes to keep this operation running, to supply the three drugs that will flow through the IV. Your own neighbors—your mailman, your grocery store clerk, the single mother across the street—pay money to make sure your government can kill you in exactly this way.

It seems abundantly clear now, the opportunity you’ve wasted. 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.