Notes on an Execution(26)

The words felt useless. Far too light.

“Why didn’t you?” Hazel asked.

“I could feel it,” Jenny said. “Like back when we were kids. I was in the library, studying, and I could feel it the second it happened. Like my very own tendons were snapping. It hurt, Hazel. It was the first time I felt that power and wished I didn’t have it.”

When Jenny left, Hazel’s room felt empty, changed. On the blanket, Jenny had left a single shiny hair. Hazel picked it up at the tip, watched the tail sashay gracefully through the air. She brought it to her lips. Rolled it into her mouth. The strand of hair tasted like nothing at all—she could only feel the shape of it, firmly existent, a spider on the pad of her tongue.

*

The performance had begun like any other. Swan Lake. The stage lights were hot, Hazel’s shoes soft against the marley. They were on their last wear, before she’d sew the ribbons on a new pair. She didn’t feel it in her toes, though perhaps she should have. She’d made it almost to the finale, her last solo sequence, and she felt edgeless, full of energy. When Hazel began her fouetté turns, the audience spun and righted itself, eight counts and again, her head flicking to keep up with the whip of her body.

She was fully inside the choreography when it happened. Remembering, Hazel felt grateful for those last few moments of herself. For the way her legs carried her into the preparation for the leap, the pas de bourrée, the two bounding steps before the grand jeté. 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.

*

Hazel did not know how long she’d been asleep when she jolted awake to the sound of barking.

She was still wearing her Christmas dress, rumpled up around her waist, legs splayed uncomfortable on top of the covers. The room was dark, stale, and hushed, the quiet interrupted by Gertie’s barking, which echoed insistently from the back door—they’d learned to ignore the dog until she lulled herself back to sleep. But as Gertie continued, frantic, Hazel heaved herself from the bed, hopping one-legged past the window.

The sudden motion stopped her. A flicker of movement, beyond the glass. Hazel rubbed the sleep from her eyes, blinked hard to be sure she wasn’t dreaming.

It was Ansel, clear in the moonlight. He stood beneath the maple tree in her parents’ backyard, flannel pajama pants tucked into winter boots. He leaned on the shovel from the garage, his jacket revealing his wrists as he scooped clumps of snow and wet dirt. A scoop, a whack. Hazel watched, bemused, as Ansel dug a hole. It was maybe a foot deep—he dug until his forearm disappeared into the depth of it. By the time he clapped the dirt from his hands, Gertie had gone quiet, and Hazel slipped back into bed, listening to the whoosh of the sliding glass door, to Ansel’s footsteps shuffling up the stairs.

Her clock read 4:16 a.m.—surely, Jenny was asleep, unaware. Sleep would be impossible, Hazel’s brain frenetic with the strangeness of what she had seen. Five o’clock passed, then six. By six thirty, the sky out the window had blanched to a sweet, unfettered blue, and a new sound revealed itself down the hall. So subtle at first, Hazel strained to listen.

Whispers. Rustling.

This time, Hazel reached through the dim for her crutches. Her bedroom door made no sound as it opened—she took soft steps across the carpet, her heart alert and listless. She knew before she reached the guest room exactly what she would find.

They were naked on top of the comforter, the door cracked slightly open. Exposed in the rising light, their eyes were closed—Jenny’s back was pressed to Ansel’s chest, and Ansel’s massive hand cupped Jenny’s breast as he pulsed into her, the shaft of him glinting wet. His hands had been washed, a pristine white, no sign now of the dirt or the shovel. Hazel wondered if she had dreamed the scene, imagined it altogether. Jenny’s legs were spread, her head thrown back; her neck was so delicate in the winter dawn, unprotected. In the reticent strip of light, Jenny’s body was not necessarily Jenny’s. She could have been Hazel, covered in this sheen of sweat, so loose and gasping. Hazel, lost to the kind of motion that made you wiser, the kind that made you separate, the kind that made you real.

Ansel opened his eyes.

Hazel did not have time to move from the door or to conceal herself. In that gut-dropping millisecond before the shock exploded and she stumbled back on her crutches, Ansel’s gaze bore right into her. There was something new in him, something savage, like the damp, infested soil beneath an overturned rock. She had witnessed a secret in the yard, something meant to stay hidden. And now Hazel was watching Ansel’s return, his transformation from single to double, his insertion back into Jenny. It was scary, his body’s forceful wanting. Stark, what it told her.

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.





7 Hours




Gravy, for lunch. The soggy mass slides into your cell, a gelatinous lump atop a meager portion of turkey, accompanied by half a cup of green beans, floating in water. No coffee today—a collective groan echoes down the row. A-Pod is organized so you cannot see anyone, but you know the distinctive sounds of each inmate. Today, they are hungry. As you spoon the formless substance into your mouth, you imagine you are eating a cheeseburger instead, biting into a patty of rare, simmering pink.