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.

She knew that love could swaddle you tight, and also bruise.

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.

wonder about choices. How we resent them, and how we regret them—even as we watch them grow.

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

We are all bad, and we are all good, and no one should be condemned to one or the other. But if good can be tainted with the bad that comes after, then where do you place it? How do you count it? How much is it really worth?

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.

If I’m simply a series of choices, I’m glad they led me here.”

They were no longer an us, but rather two separate people, growing at two separate paces, one awake and blazing, the other formless and grasping.

Sometimes you are certain this is all you are made of: a fleeting instant between action and inaction. Doing something, or not. Where is the difference, you wonder? Where is the choice. Where is the line, between stillness and motion?

But Saffy knew about catastrophe. It was arbitrary. A thing that descended from nowhere, pointed a bony finger, and smirked. As if to say: I choose you.

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

Evil isn’t something you can pinpoint or hold, cradle or banish. Evil hides, sly and invisible, in the corners of everything else.

Lavender wanted to tell them what she had learned about demons. Often, they were not demons at all—only the jagged parts of herself she’d hidden from the sun.

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.

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

Please, you would beg. I’ll feel anything. Just show me how.

there was only this, a brief and imperfect and singular reality. She would have to find a way to live it.

How much responsibility could a person hold, Lavender wondered. How much, before the overflow?

she told them everything she could remember—the sparkling and the hideous, the fond and the searing—a fraction of her life’s weight seemed to lift with the words. This was the gift of the young, Lavender thought. They had the strength to carry.

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.

Every second is a year. Every second is your failure, every second is your lifeline. Every second goes to waste.

Your Theory was supposed to make you different. It was supposed to make you special, better, more.

It is a comfort to know that once, you were little enough to be cradled. Once, there was only wheatgrass and wonder, the earth turning ordinary beneath the train of your spine.

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.

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.

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.

There are millions of other moments Izzy has lived, but he has eaten them up one by one, until she exists in most memories as a summation of that awful second, distilled constantly in her fear, her pain, the brutal fact.

There were things I felt, before the fear.