Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.

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.

No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.

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.

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.

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

You do not feel the same love that everyone else does. Yours is muted, damp, not bursting or breaking. But there is a place for you, in the category of personhood. There has to be.