Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

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.

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

Love was a thing that could move you and change you, Saffy knew, a mysterious force that made you different and better and warmer and whole.

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

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.

It occurred to Saffy that there were many ways to hurt—not all of them physical.

You don’t need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.

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.

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.