Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

you have always believed that pity is the most offensive of feelings. Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.

Manifestos are incoherent, scrawled hastily before pointless acts of terror. Your Theory is 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.

When people asked where she was from—no, where she was really from—Saffy would tell them. My father is from India. No, I’ve never been. Yes, I’d like to go someday. And every time, she would feel an exhaustion that reached her very bones.

For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist at all.

“You’re the best young investigator they’ve seen in decades. And besides, you make a good story, Saff. Wayward teen turns her life around. You’re like a detective from a TV show, the poor little orphan haunted by her past.

Saffy recognized the monster in her own body. A wild creature, reaching out hungry, starving for annihilation.

It was the scariest thing about being a woman. It was hardwired, ageless, the part that knew you could have the good without the hurt, but it wouldn’t be nearly as exquisite.

You can do the vilest thing. It’s not so hard, to be bad. Evil isn’t something you can pinpoint or hold, cradle or banish. Evil hides, sly and invisible, in the corners of everything else.

Often, they were not demons at all—only the jagged parts of herself she’d hidden from the sun.

“It’s meant to show how we are always reinventing ourselves, creating new homes to accompany our various evolutions. The family pictured here is both evolving and permanent. I wanted to explore that paradox.”

“Oh, Lavender,” Cheryl said. “Ansel was never our child. He was yours.”

The past was a thing you could open like a box, gaze down on with starry eyes. But it was too dangerous to step inside.

The desperation is intentional, maybe the most important part of this exercise. It is why they made you wait for years, then months, now hours and minutes, the whole of your life transformed into a countdown. The point is this. The waiting, the knowing, the not wanting to die.

My thoughts. My beliefs. Don’t you think it’s important to know that something of yourself exists beyond your own body? Something that can outlive death?

Saffy credited her success to the knowledge: for every criminal who fit a stereotype, there were dozens who didn’t. 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. Saffy knew it was a matter of learning those intricacies, of trying to understand, an act that felt intolerably intimate. Unbearably human. Sometimes, like a twisted form of love.

Kensington was a prick, and a middling detective, but he glided up the ranks on the clean, easy strength of his charisma.

Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.

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.

What do you want? She wanted to be good, whatever that meant.

she prayed that the difference between good and evil was simply a matter of trying.

You did not plan it or fantasize it. You only moved on the force of what you knew yourself to be. It should matter, the distance between your desire and your actions. It should matter that you wanted to love Jenny, or at least to learn how. You did not want to kill her.

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.

the thing her mother’s eyes do when they first catch sight of Hazel. They snag, widen. A brief flicker of hope cools into disappointment. In that bottomless millisecond, her mother sees two daughters. Hazel is always the wrong one.

Hazel believes that a person can be evil, and nothing more. 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.

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.

But there is a place for you, in the category of personhood. There has to be. Humanity can discard you, but they cannot deny it. Your heart pounds. Your palms sweat. Your body wants and wants. It seems abundantly clear now, the opportunity you’ve wasted. There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone.

No one remembers Izzy like this. Her sister, Selena, does, but only when she makes herself think past the horror. Usually Izzy—the real Izzy—is invisible beneath the shadow of what happened to her. The tragedy is that she is dead, but the tragedy is also that she belongs to him. The bad man, who did the bad thing.