Notes on an Execution
Danya Kukafka
12 Hours
You are a fingerprint.
When you open your eyes on the last day of your life, you see your own thumb. In the jaundiced prison light, the lines on the pad of your thumb look like a dried-out riverbed, like sand washed into twirling patterns by water, once there and now gone.
The nail is too long. You remember that old childhood myth—how after you die, your nails keep growing until they curl around your bones.
*
Inmate, state your name and number.
Ansel Packer, you call out. 999631.
You roll over in your cot. The ceiling forms its usual picture, a pattern of water stains. If you tilt your head just right, the damp patch near the corner blooms in the shape of an elephant. Today is the day, you think, to the fleck of lumped paint that forms the elephant’s trunk. Today is the day. The elephant smiles like it knows a desperate secret. You have spent many hours replicating this exact expression, matching the elephant on the ceiling grin for grin—today, it comes genuine. You and the elephant smile at each other until the fact of this morning blooms into an excited understanding, until you both look like maniacs.
You swing your legs over the edge of the bed, heave your body from the mattress. You pull on your prison-issue shoes, black slippers that leave an inch for your feet to slide around. You run water from the metal faucet over your toothbrush, squeeze out a gritty trail of toothpaste powder, then wet your hair in front of the small mirror, in which the glass is not actually glass, instead a pitted, scarring aluminum that would not shatter if it broke. In it, your reflection is blurry and warped. You bite each of your fingernails over the sink, one by one, ripping off the white carefully, evenly, until they are uniformly and raggedly short.
The countdown is often the hardest part, the chaplain told you, when he visited last night. Usually you like the chaplain, a balding man hunched with something like shame. The chaplain is new to Polunsky Unit—his face is soft and malleable, wide open, like you could reach right in. The chaplain spoke about forgiveness and relieving the burden, and accepting what we cannot change. Then, the question.
Your witness, the chaplain said through the visitation window. Is she coming?
You pictured the letter on your shelf, in that cramped little cell. The cream envelope, beckoning. The chaplain watched you with a stark sort of pity—you have always believed that pity is the most offensive of feelings. Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.
She’s coming, you said. Then: You have something in your teeth. You watched the man’s hand rush anxious to his mouth.
In truth, you have not given much thought to tonight. It is too abstract, too easy to bend. The rumors on 12 Building are never worth listening to—one guy came back, pardoned only ten minutes before the injection, already strapped onto the gurney, and said he’d been tortured for hours, bamboo stuck up his fingernails like he was a hero in an action movie. Another inmate claimed they gave him donuts. You prefer not to wonder. It’s okay to be afraid, the chaplain said. But you are not afraid. Instead, you feel a nauseous sense of marvel—lately, you dream you are flying through clear blue sky, soaring over wide swaths of crop circles. Your ears pop with altitude.
*
The wristwatch you inherited back on C-Pod is set five minutes ahead. You like to be prepared. It claims you have eleven hours, twenty-three minutes left.
They have promised it won’t hurt. They have promised you won’t feel anything at all. There was a psychiatrist once, who sat across from you in the visitation room in a crisp suit and expensive glasses. She told you things you have always suspected and cannot forget, things you wish you had never heard spoken aloud. By your usual calculations, the psychiatrist’s face should have given you more—usually, you can gauge the proper level of sad or sorry this way. But the psychiatrist was blank, purposefully so, and you hated her for this. 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.
*
By 6:07 a.m., your supplies are arranged.
You mixed the paints last night—Froggy taught you how, back on C-Pod. You used the spine of a heavy book to crush down a set of colored pencils, then mixed the powder with a pot of Vaseline from commissary. You soaked three Popsicle sticks in water, saved from the ice cream bars you traded dozens of ramen noodle flavor packets to afford, and worked the wood until it frayed, fanning like the bristles of a paintbrush.
Now, you set up on the floor by the door of your cell. You are careful to ensure that the edge of your cardboard canvas nestles directly inside the strip of light that beams in from the hall. You ignore the breakfast tray on the floor, untouched since it was served at 3:00 a.m., the gravy filmed over, canned fruit already swarming with carpenter ants. It is April, but it feels like July; the heaters often run in the summer, and the pat of butter has melted to a little pool of fat.