Status Updates From Notes on an Execution

"There was a plea in Sergeant Moretti’s gaze—a cynical hope Saffy had
come to recognize, the most honest expression of this inscrutable job. A
perfect mirror of the fucked-up world, violence and tragedy mingling with a desperate sort of faith."

I want this to be over

Sigh...this makes me so uncomfortable and yet i want to know more.

"Shawna is a woman made up of other people’s
perceptions. The most malleable type. She shops at Costco, she bites her
nails. She never learned how to properly apply makeup, so it runs in blue
streaks beneath her eyes. Shawna is the kind of woman who likes to be told exactly who she is."

"Joy is a cousin of love, you read once. If you cannot feel love, there is at
least this weaker relative, tantalizing in memory: the relish of meat,
perfectly cooked, melting on the tongue. You know how to swallow, to
close your eyes and delight."

"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."

"Hazel understood it, then. A glimmer of the intrigue that had sucked
Jenny in and was slowly stealing her away. Hazel herself was breathless, all
stuttering adrenaline and stunned curiosity. Tragedy had a texture. A knot,
begging to be unraveled. The things Hazel wanted were unspeakable,
intangible, too blurry to touch—the things she wanted already belonged to
her sister."

"'There is no such thing as good or evil. Instead, we have memory and
choice, and we all live at various points on the spectrum between. We are
created by what has happened to us, combined with who we choose to be.'"

"You felt like your child self, standing helpless, trying to confess: Sometimes I do things I can’t explain. The need was piercing, persistent. It didn’t really matter that the act was wrong—this seemed like the most trivial and irrelevant detail."

"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."

"None of it touched her, because she had this. It
was magic. Maybe, even, it was love. 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. A delicious smell. Familiar, untraceable.
It made her hungry."

"When the music started, the feeling was uncanny. Saffy was certain she’d
lived this moment before, in some other life, the song reaching through her
chest to touch a place she’d somehow forgotten."

"how sad it was that a single bad thing could turn you into a
story, a matter to be whispered about. Tragedy was undiscerning and totally unfair."

"At night, the mysteries of the house laid themselves bare. Saffy
huddled beneath her scratchy pink comforter and reveled in the exquisite
aloneness as the house shifted, exhaled."

"Manifestos are for crazy people, you explained slowly. Manifestos are incoherent, scrawled hastily before pointless acts of terror. Your Theory is more an exploration of the most inherent human truth. No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between."

"The look is horror. It is confusion. It is the worst kind of pity, a pity that despises itself."

"Despite it all, you are thankful for the memory—for the sight of the sea, tumbling in the distance.
It is possible, looking at the ocean, to believe it never ends."

"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."

"She’d unclasped it from his neck the last time she’d given him a bath and
pocketed it thoughtlessly. This will keep you safe, she had told him. It
seemed unbearably cruel, that she could bestow such a promise then
accidentally steal it away. The truth felt swollen in the dark of the closet. No little trinket—and no amount of love—could keep anyone safe."

"Before Johnny lunged, she expected some nightmare version of him, a
person she’d never seen. But no. In the milliseconds before the blow,
Lavender looked at the same rugged man she had always known, and she
thought, with a clarity that bordered on sympathy: You could have been
anything, Johnny. You could have been anything but this."

"It wasn’t that he’d been replaced by this grizzly stranger, more that he’d evolved. Grown into his own shadow."

"It was like she’d held her own desire too long in the palm of her
hand and it was now just an object, devoid of meaning, useless and taking
up space."

"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."

"Lavender loved Johnny’s scraggly hair, his rotation of flannel shirts,
his heavy work boots. Johnny’s hands were always filthy from the farm, but
Lavender loved how he smelled. Like grease and sunshine."

"The feeling hit Lavender just in time: a love so consuming, it felt more
like panic. The sensation was followed immediately by a nauseous, tidal
guilt. Because Lavender knew, from the second she saw the baby, that she
did not want this kind of love. It was too much. Too hungry. But it had been
growing inside her all these months, and now it had fingers, toes. It was
gulping oxygen."

"She was seventeen years old. She knew what it meant, to bring life into
the world. The gravity. She knew that love could swaddle you tight, and
also bruise. But until the time came, Lavender did not understand what it
meant to walk away from a thing she’d grown from her own insides."

"She is the type of woman who reads romance novels with hulking men on their covers... Shawna loves you because you cannot get much closer, for the fact of the steel door between you, promising both passion and safety."

"no matter what they say you are capable of—it cannot be love, that would be neurologically impossible—looking at the photograph of the Blue House
brings you there. To the place where the shrieking stops. The quiet is
delicious, a gasping relief."

"We Are All Rabid.
You smile every time you see it—it is so bizarre, so nonsensical, so unlike
the other prison graffiti (mostly scripture and genitalia). There is a quiet
truth to it that you would almost call hilarious, given the context."

"A new symphony begins, quiet at first,
before tightening and deepening—you linger in the rush of cello, thinking
how things tend to accelerate, building on themselves, leading always to
some spectacular crescendo."