Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

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

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

This job was getting to her. Not the bodies, or the missing children, or the rampant opioids. It was this. Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.

Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.

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.