Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

He gets the attention. He gets the media, the discourse, the carefully regulated procedure. Real punishment would look different, Hazel knows—like a lonely, epic nothing. A life sentence in a men’s prison, the years rotting as they pass. The long forgetting of his name. A heart attack or a slip in the shower, the sort of faceless death he deserves. Instead, Ansel has been given this noble sacrifice. Martyr status. Hazel feels guilty, complicit in the process. She sees the constant stream of Black men on the evening news, shot by police as they’re stopped for broken taillights, hauled into prison for carrying a pocketful of weed, and she tries feebly to teach her children about inequity, about institutional prejudice, about the poisonous history of this country’s justice system. She makes cardboard signs and marches through Burlington’s downtown, chanting for equality. She repeats these phrases to Alma, even as she knows: it is a privilege, to stand in front of the cameras. It is a privilege to be seen, to speak your last words into a microphone. 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.