Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

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

The love between sisters was not the sort of thing she’d read about in books or swooned over in movies. It embodied a category all in itself, a quiet knowing that swam in her veins, even when Jenny was miles away. Sister love was like food, or air, or memory itself. It was molecular. The very stuff of her. But it was not a love she chose, and for this, Hazel would always resent the part of herself that feared—maybe hoped—that she would never love anyone quite the way she loved Jenny.

“I’m not mad,” Hazel told her, and this was true. She was tired. Lost and withering. Hazel almost wished she were angry—that would be easier than this wide and lonely nothing.

The differences between them were loud, nearly deafening. Jenny, with her whiskey breath and smudged eyeliner, had been touched by someone else, shaped and formed by him. She was no longer the other half of Hazel’s whole—instead, her own throbbing and vibrant thing. Come back, Hazel wanted to beg, though she knew it was fruitless. She was no longer the closest thing to her sister. 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.

In the infinite moment before the landing, before the twist and crack of her knee as it bent sideways, Hazel thought: Love is adoration. Love is a gasp, love is a stretch, love is this. A blinking glimpse of eternity, aflame beneath a golden spotlight. It was the only thing she had ever learned to want.

The universe did not care how you loved. You could love like this—urgent and slippery, like a girlfriend, or a wife. You could love like a sister, or even a twin. It didn’t matter. Two connected things must always come apart.

Wincing, you rip off a single corner: the edge of the lawn, Blue’s parked car. You pop it into your mouth like a potato chip. The ink numbs in your throat, a sweet poisonous burn, as you realize what you need to do. You rip the precious photograph into strips your molars will understand. The ink is sickening between your teeth. You crunch down anyway, until the photo has evaporated sharp in your throat, until the Blue House is forever a part of you.

You do believe in the multiverse. The eternal possibility of it. There is a version of you out there—a child, unabandoned. A boy who came home from school to a mother who read you stories and kissed your forehead goodnight. There is a version of you who never put that fox in Saffy Singh’s bed, who learned how to banish Baby Packer’s screaming any other way. A man who never married Jenny. There is a version of yourself who lost only the things that everyone loses. You like to believe that every alternate self would have found the Blue House, too.

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

The way death peeled itself deliberately from a bone.

As the years faded, Saffy remembered less and less about her mother. The tiny things had slipped away without saying goodbye.

Felix culpa, her mother had written. The happy fault. The horrible thing that leads to the good.

She and Kristen rarely talked about those years, in which Saffy had drifted through the underbelly of this unforgiving town, mirroring Lila’s downward spiral. Now, Saffy wanted to tell Kristen how the drugs had felt, melting through her veins, how she’d passed entire days lying on a dusty mattress. How she’d known Lila’s life and then grown out of it—how Lila had not gotten the chance to do the same.

She let the smell of Kristen’s hair products engulf her, with the knowledge she’d harbored for a while now—Kristen was Saffy’s only family, and soon Kristen would not belong to her.

A fear that felt oddly addictive. There was something alive in Saffy’s cells, feeding hungry on such doubt—it was sick, tainted, and it had grown like a tree, curious as it twisted upward.

As he grabbed his keys and stormed out, his discomfort hurling the shame onto her, Saffy recognized the monster in her own body. A wild creature, reaching out hungry, starving for annihilation.

She glimpsed that same craving in Jenny Fisk—an ask, for suffering. 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.

Kristen’s spine looked so delicate in her intricate white gown, Saffy wanted to fling herself across the vertebrae, to protect them from the harsh of the world.

This day was about love, but Saffy had always been more interested in power. The black and pulsing heart of it. Power was the clink of her badge against the kitchen counter. It was the heft of the gun at her waist. As she stood at the altar, wind blowing her carefully pinned hair from its bun, as the bride and groom kissed and thunder rumbled in the distance, Saffy wondered about her own internal compass, the needle that kept her on this path, stopped her from wandering or regressing or giving up entirely. It scared her to realize there was no compass. There were only days and the choices she made within them.

The recognition felt like a slap from a parent—standing over all three of those Girls, you wished you could take it back. You shouldn’t have done it. You were sick and wrong. Most devastatingly, you were unchanged.

If you could be helped, they would have done it long ago. The singular truth of your life seemed to rise from your chest, unignorable, as you backed out through the ER’s sliding doors. You were impossible. Beyond help. You would never be more than your own creature self.

Lavender spoke to the redwoods, and sometimes they spoke back. There was a language special for the trees. A whispered understanding. The sound was clearest early in the morning, when the mist curled between rustling leaves and Lavender could still smell the night, lingering smoky in the redwoods’ bark.

They had welcomed her as a girl, broken and wandering in dirty jeans—and they soothed her now, forty-six years old and a different person entirely. The scent always brought her back: to the deck behind the farmhouse, all cedar breeze and alpine sigh. Sometimes Lavender caught a whiff of milky breath, puckered baby lips, tiny hands flailing, and in these moments, she pressed her forehead to the mottled bark and prayed.

After the redwoods, Lavender often felt small. Mortal, flimsy. It was always disappointing: the sun would rise, and again, the truth. No matter how far Lavender traveled, that girl from the farmhouse followed on her heels, a wispy shadow, starving for relief. But

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 never did find her friend, but Lavender pushed forward those years on the road with a surprising sense of infallibility—the world felt bearable, knowing Julie had survived it first.

Lavender liked to imagine that her children were happy. That her boys had found their own ways to exist in the world, that they were soft and satisfied. This was as far as she would go. This was the reason she’d swaddled herself so forcefully in the isolation of Gentle Valley—here, she did not have to look. She did not have to wonder about the long tentacles of a choice she’d made when she was a different person, practically still a child. She did not have to see how the arms of that choice had reached into the world, the infinite number of realities they might have sculpted.

But it was clear now, in the devastating narrow of her memory. There was nothing like the love you had for your own child. It was biological. Primal and evolutionary. It was chronic, unbanishable. It had been living inside her all this time. Bone-deep.

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.

Dear Ansel. I hope that you can smell the trees. They talk, did you know? If you ever feel lost, just whisper to the bark. Dear Ansel. I hope the world has been good to you. I hope you have been good to it. Dear Ansel. My love. My heart. My little boy. I—

You stumble into the cell, wishing you had not looked. That room is like heaven, or hell, or the moment of death itself: a place you should not see until your name is called.

That was the great power of Jenny: not love at first sight, but some kind of un-haunting.

Alone, she queued up her favorite Bach CD, reveling in the high studio ceilings as she led herself through a barre warm-up. She let her body say the rest. She stretched, she leapt. She hurled herself against the floor. For that hour every Tuesday, Hazel did not have children, or medical bills, or debt from the business degree she probably didn’t need, no tummy-aches or broccoli on the floor or screaming for dessert. She only had her joints, rapt and unbetraying. Her muscles, exalted.

framed in the door, utterly still, Ansel stood straight and tall, his face twisted into the purest expression of rage Hazel had ever seen. He was a wolf, gnashing teeth. Inhuman. She pulled away from the curb in stuttered spurts, her legs shaking so hard the car jerked, her gaze transfixed on the rearview mirror. Hazel knew she would forever think of him like this, a menacing form in reflection, the shape of a furious man on a porch, getting smaller and smaller until he was nothing at all. A pinprick, a thing of the past.

Transfixed by her reflection, Hazel imagined she had lived her entire life as this unrecognizable human, that she had always known this slim stranger face. Hazel lifted a hand from beneath the damp smock, to touch the teardrop freckle on her cheek. It seemed much larger than it had before. Less like a blemish, and more like a signal, the very thing that made Hazel herself. The feeling was so utterly delicious—Hazel watched, euphoric, as the twin in the mirror opened her mouth to a laugh that looked like waking, like becoming, like salvation.

There has to be a purpose, she would say. Pointless pain isn’t human instinct. We’ll always find meaning in it. Optimistic, you’d say. It’s not optimism, Jenny would tell you. Just survival.

Why all the writing? Shawna asked you this once, near the beginning. You were sitting on the floor with your notebooks spread around, your hands stained black with ink. It’s the only way to be permanent, you told her. It’s like I’m leaving a piece of myself behind. What exactly are you trying to leave? Shawna asked. I don’t know, you said, irritated. 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? Shawna only shrugged and said: I think some people have left enough already.

You whisper it, gentle at first. The pages on the floor do not move, do not rustle, only stare up at you. So you say it louder. The words echo back, bouncing hollow off the walls. What about the Blue House? Even if it ends right here—even if no one listens—there is always the Blue House. The Blue House is your Theory, standing steadfast. The Blue House is proof. You are expansive, like everyone else. You are complex. You are more than just the wicked.

It seemed, then, that the universe was both cruel and miraculous. Spiteful and forgiving. Baby Packer had not been screaming all those years to punish you. He had been screaming like all babies did: to tell you something.

You recognized her immediately. Blue Harrison was waiting at a table in the corner, hunched and self-conscious, so very sixteen as she fiddled with a plastic straw. The sight of her was visceral, astounding. Until you saw Blue Harrison, you did not realize how constant that sound had been. A silence settled in the darkest cave of your head, the place where the baby had been softly mewling for years—the relief was nearly crippling in its totality.

Blue Harrison looked almost exactly like your mother. In that instant, Baby Packer seemed to look up. Calm now, sweet and blinking. As if to say: Finally. You found me.

A mystery, Saffy could unravel then study, an exact and unequivocal science. But some cases evolved beyond mystery, into something more crooked, more complex; the worst kind of mystery transcended its own body, transformed into a brand-new sort of monster. Some cases turned cannibal, devouring themselves until there was nothing left but gristle.

Still, Saffy tucked their file beneath her arm as she trudged out to the stale, empty parking lot. The girls always slipped out in moments like this, when she felt stuck or frustrated, when she had a dead end like the Lawson case. Izzy, Angela, Lila. They would slither from that folder, whispering conspiratorially. They would appear in the back seat of her unmarked Ford Explorer or behind a suspect in the interrogation room, a taunting nudge, a constant reminder. Saffy was captain, yes. But once, she’d been a girl. Every mystery was a story, and sometimes, to see the whole thing, you had to go all the way back to the beginning.

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.

The injustice felt brutal, unnecessarily savage. The years of thinking and watching, then the world’s inevitable forgetting. At a certain point, they all became Marjorie Lawson, spread-eagled on the floor, demanding something better.

There was more to this, Saffy knew, as she turned up the air conditioner, pulled her sweaty hair from her neck. Tupper Lake was part of the story that had obsessed her for years, haunting, inexplicable. It was Ansel’s story, it was Lila’s story—it was the story of Saffy’s own heart, that tangly, knotted thing.

She did not like to picture them here. Two little boys, playing games on the unfinished hardwood. A child, a baby. No mother had been good here. No father had been kind. Saffy knew abandonment, she knew tragedy, she knew loneliness. She knew violence, from the lifetime she had spent chasing it—she knew how it lingered, how it stained. Violence always left a fingerprint.

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 wanted to be good, whatever that meant. As Saffy gazed up at the ceiling, hot tears burning down her cheeks, she prayed that the difference between good and evil was simply a matter of trying.

But Saffy knew her mother had been right—this had to count as some form of love. The kind that stalked, the kind that hunted. A love startled like a sound in the night.