Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

What do you feel? she asked. The question was pointless. Feeling held so little currency. So you shrugged and told the truth: I don’t know. Nothing.

They had it now. If nothing else, Lavender had given them the gift of possibility. Her boys could touch it with their hands, the wide expanse of the world. Someday, Lavender hoped, her children would wade into the ocean. When they did, they would taste her. Lavender’s love, in a mouthful of salt.

You fixed her with your best imitation of hurt.

The first time you hurt someone, you were eleven years old, and you did not know the difference between pain and wanting. You lived in a crumbling mansion with nine other children: it started with a wink, nearly accidental, a test of your own sweetness.

The fox was just a heap of globbing bones and decomposed tissue, not even shaped like an animal anymore, flies swarming around its toothy jaw. It looked so wrong, lumpen and congealing on

“I shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “Sometimes I do things I can’t explain.”

You crammed a tender smile into the corners of your mouth. Most of the time, you understand women—often better than they understand themselves. But every now and then, you are very, very wrong.

She materialized in the headlights. In the moonlight, that first Girl was just a shadow at the end of a long driveway. A ripple of hair. The Girl squinted in the bright of your headlights—her face was perfectly animal, vulnerable and confused. You braked. You opened the door. You stepped onto the gravel.

When Ansel smiled, the grin spread across his face, like a runny egg cracked open. Of course, Hazel thought—of course Jenny would choose a person like this. A human magnet. Hazel blushed with the attention, conscious of her context in the frame of this moment. Her existence, simplified. She was Jenny’s body double. “Ansel,” Hazel said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

The options are infinite. Our alternate selves live in another dimension, multiplying, just outside our line of sight. I could be a writer, or a philosopher, or a baseball player. The possibilities are endless. They prove that who I am—my goodness or my badness—it’s fluctuating. Morality is not fixed. It’s fluid, ever-changing.

How dangerous, you thought. How futile. How senseless, to reveal even a corner of yourself—when that self, they say, is monster.

Everything had been lighter. Prettier. You wondered if this was the feeling people talked about, if this was happy.

But the most bemusing version of you—the one you cannot reckon with—is the Ansel Packer who did everything the same and simply never got caught.

There were so many ways her life could have turned. She could have lived one long basement party. She could have died alongside Travis in his overdose three years ago. She could very well have cleaned up some other way.

The truth feels stupid, in the shadow of tonight. Heartbreakingly simple. You had not known, until the Blue House, what you were capable of becoming. It was fleeting, ethereal. It was tragically uncomplicated. At the Blue House, you were free.

That girl out there, you say. Blue. She is living proof. I can be normal. I can be good. Of course you can be good, the chaplain says. Everyone can be good. That’s not the question.

The texture of Jenny. Fruit shampoo, hangover breath. You remember how she used to tease you, hands on your cheeks. It’s okay to feel things, she liked to say with a laugh, and this always irritated you. But if you could go back now, you would clap your hands over hers, relish in the knobby warmth of Jenny’s fingers—the only person who dared to stand between the world and yourself. Please, you would beg. I’ll feel anything. Just show me how.

Maybe things would have been different if you’d just done it then, talked to her in the shock of day, as people streamed through the revolving doors. But you were too curious.

A cataclysm. In that moment, she was more than Jenny—she was all of them. Every woman who had left you behind.

Jenny, you wanted to plead. Jenny, it’s me. You wanted the Jenny you had chosen for her patience and her comfort, the Jenny who’d rolled over in bed to press her lips to your shoulder blade. You wanted the Jenny who had believed you could be more than yourself. The Jenny who had given you a life worth surviving. But there was only terror, in that kitchen.

There was a split second, where it could have gone differently. Maybe there were millions of those alternate seconds—if the kitchen knife had not glinted in her grasp—if, if, if—things could have been different. Even as you lunged, as Jenny raised her hands in a defense that looked like surrender, you ached for those substitute lives, the milliseconds that held endless possibility. She was just a Girl. You were only you.

No one seems to care. No one seems to understand how intent can change things. Of all the facts that brought you here, this one feels most important: that night came from your very core. 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.

Her mother’s voice echoed tinny from the phone, which she’d hurled across the deck, now splayed ten feet away. Hazel stared at a spiderweb on the leg of the porch chair, grasping; the web was silky and translucent, a single fly swaddled motionless in the center. Time warped. It stretched, faded. Morning churned into afternoon, stammering spurts of surreal minutes that constricted in Hazel’s throat like balloons. The body, Luis was saying on the phone with her father. An arrest. The hours passed, shell-shocked, incoherent. The only person Hazel wished to call with the news was Jenny herself.

Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Grief was a loneliness that felt like a planet.

This was not about him. It never had been. It seemed insane, almost laughable, that one person—Ansel, a single man, so deeply average—had created a chasm so colossal.

There was a world Saffy could not bear to consider—a world that was quickly consuming her own—in which Saffy had turned Ansel into exactly the monster she needed him to be.

“No,” Ansel said, remarkably calm. “You’re wrong. I don’t know why I killed them. I don’t know why I killed any of them.”

What a disappointment. She had finally solved this epic mystery—touched the place where Ansel’s hurt had congealed—only to find his pain looked just like everyone else’s. The difference lay in what he chose to do with it.

The man who had grown from her child felt as distant as the cucumbers she’d planted last summer and failed to bring to fruit.

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.

Ansel gets the glorified title of serial killer, a phrase that seems to inspire a bizarre, primitive lust. Books and documentaries and dark tunnels on the internet. Crowds of women, captivated.

It has never been about Jenny. Jenny is not interesting. Men kill their ex-wives all the time. It’s about the other girls.

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.

“I think—well, bad people feel pain, too.” Blue’s hands drip into the basin. The bathroom echoes, cavernous. In the long wait, Hazel sees hurt. It is different from Hazel’s own, but it is hurt nonetheless.

This, Hazel knows, is the miracle of sisterhood. Of love itself. Death is cruel, and infinite, and inevitable, but it is not the end. Jenny exists in every room Hazel walks through. She fills, she shivers. She spreads, dispersing, until she is nowhere—until she is everywhere—until she lives wherever Hazel carries her.

The names come to you then—a surprise. You so rarely think of them as separate people, those Girls, but they feel different in this instant. Distinct and exacting. Izzy, Angela, Lila. Jenny.

You can tell from how her brow knits: she is crying for Jenny, but there is more. This woman has known you for nearly thirty years, and you recognize her shattered pity. Jenny’s mother is also crying for you.

She does not cry. She only blames her gaze right onto your helplessness. Unsettled, you realize it is exactly how Jenny used to look at you.

You are certain, then. Within all the despicable things you have done—here, in the last two minutes of your life—here is the proof. You do not feel the same love that everyone else does. Yours is muted, damp, not bursting or breaking.

You have lived your years in careful imitation, mimicking the things someone else would say, think, feel, and now you are tired.

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. There are millions of other moments Izzy has lived, but he has eaten them up one by one,

From wherever Izzy is now, she wishes she could say: Before all this, my shoulders burned scarlet. I peeled off the flakes, flicked them into the sink. There were things I felt, before the fear. I ate an orange in the sun. Let me tell you how it tasted.

Lila’s third child would have been a girl after all. They would have named her Grace. She does not exist, but if she did, Grace would have become the executive director of the Columbus Zoo.

There would have been 6,552 babies. Over a span of eighteen years, 6,552 hearts would have beat unconscious, cocooned in the blank swim of their mothers’ wombs. 204 of those babies would have been born blue, then slapped awake. 81 would have died. But 6,471 infants would have taken their first gasps of oxygen as they slid from echoing caves—they’d have stretched their thrashing limbs into Jenny’s waiting hands.

He hides his evil beneath his wit and his charm. Maybe this is why we love him: because he could be anyone.

I suspect there are very few people in the world who wake up in the morning and decide to be bad. Perhaps it is this contradiction that holds us captive, rather than the serial killers themselves.

Average men become interesting when they start hurting women. Notes on an Execution was born from a desire to dissect this exhausted narrative. We

Thirty years after his death, Bundy gets another Netflix series, his prison tapes re-released. He remains the center of our cultural obsession, his victims relegated to vague flashes of hair on a television screen. And yet we rarely talk about what we lose when women die. Where would

There is a universe out there, made up of girls and women, stranded by a fiction we insist upon repeating. I wrote this book to give them a chance to exist beyond the men who steal the narrative.