Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

Outside this room, the beating world continues. The sun is low and pinking. Tall grass splays across endless fields. The air smells, out there, like spruce and river, like salt and hydrangea. You see it all, a flash of perfect omniscience: the whole of the planet, orbiting carelessly, indifferent and vivid and stunning and cruel. It blinks at you, briefly, before moving on.

But they do not live in that world—and they do not live in this one.