Notes on an Execution(86)

By her side, Hazel stands rigid. She watches you, intent, without fear or hesitation. You remember how Hazel used to steal glances from across the living room—how she used to want you. Now, she does not smile. 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. From the angled gurney, Hazel is just as implacable as Jenny herself. Just as perplexing. Your arm jerks against the gurney’s strap, your body’s instinct a cruelty in itself—you want to touch her one last time.

And there she is. Through the window on the left.

Blue stands next to Tina, strawberry hair pulled back from her neck. The corners of her have filled out, grown. Blue looks like a summer evening. Like a dusk spent wading through fields of bluegrass, like gentle hands brushing your hair from your eyes. At the sight of Blue’s freckled nose, you hear your mother’s voice, clearer than ever before.

*

The seconds tick down. You catch your own reflection in the glass, an accident. You are transparent in the crowd of their faces. A ghost already, halfway gone. Your cheekbones look hollow, your glasses sit too big on your face. You are horrified to see that in these last waiting minutes, you only look like yourself.

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. But there is a place for you, in the category of personhood. There has to be. Humanity can discard you, but they cannot deny it. Your heart pounds. Your palms sweat. Your body wants and wants. It seems abundantly clear now, the opportunity you’ve wasted. 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. The slippery thing you have always been chasing.

*

It arrives, at first, tingling small. Fleeting, a lump at the base of your throat. Something fragile and birdlike is trapped in your body, fluttering inconsolable.

Fear.

You swallow it in.

*

Last words, the warden says. The medical staff and the chaplain have all gone now—you suspect they wait somewhere behind the smudgy glass mirror. The room feels smaller, just you and the warden.

A boom mic is lowered from the ceiling. You have not prepared. Ten seconds pass by, unbearably thick. For once, there is no game to play. No power to withhold, nobody to trick or impress. You have lived your years in careful imitation, mimicking the things someone else would say, think, feel, and now you are tired. The microphone is too far from the gurney—you struggle against the straps, trying to reach.

I promise I’ll be better, you say, your voice booming sorry. Give me one more chance.

There is no answer. Only the shifting eyes of the witnesses behind the glass, averted uncomfortable. You wish for touch, in this moment, for the feeling of someone else’s hand in yours. Your whole body shudders, grasping for something more meaningful than tears.

The warden removes his glasses.

The infamous signal.

Now.

*

You pray. In the next life, you hope you will be reincarnated as something softer—something that understands the innate sort of longing that makes a being whole. A graceful creature. Hummingbird. A dove.

*

They swore you would not feel it. They swore it would not hurt. But there is pain in this kind of fear—blistering, primal. It hurts, the chemicals bursting through your veins, your limbs twitching wild against the straps.

No, you beg.

A consuming panic, as the poison floods your body.

Don’t. Please.

*

Outside this room, the beating world continues. The sun is low and pinking. Tall grass splays across endless fields. The air smells, out there, like spruce and river, like salt and hydrangea. You see it all, a flash of perfect omniscience: the whole of the planet, orbiting carelessly, indifferent and vivid and stunning and cruel. It blinks at you, briefly, before moving on.

*

As your hands lose sensation, as the edges of your vision water and dissolve, something seems to rise. A mass. It lifts from your chest and into the air, hovering above the blurry room. You want to reach out and touch—but you are immobile. The mass is the dark of you, the thing that tugs. In this last half-second, the very end of yourself, you understand both the tragedy and the mercy. You look it dead in the eye, the center of that raging storm. Cleaved from you, it seems so small. Powerless.

There is a millisecond of glory, in which you exist without it, in which you are bright, erupting. Full of love. This is it, you know. The sensation you’ve been missing. In this fading instant, it fills you to bursting—your life’s great and singular generosity.

One last shuddering exhale, one last rattling whoosh of breath.

A wide and awful lunge. Sweeping, wrecking. Blazing, glorious.

At last.





Elsewhere




In another world, they are sleeping. They are setting the table, or jogging through the park, they are watching the news or helping with math homework, they are working late, walking the dog, pulling clogs of hair from the shower drain. In another world, this is a regular evening for Izzy, Angela, Lila, Jenny. But they do not live in that world—and they do not live in this one.

*

Here is how Izzy Sanchez would like to be remembered: