*
Twelve minutes. The walls shrink, condense. You pull your knees to your chest, and weakly, you pray. You have never believed in God, but you address him now, last-ditch, halfhearted. God, if you are out there. God, if you can hear me. God—
*
You remember a meteor shower. You were small, maybe three. Grass poked through the thick wool blanket, and you gazed up with a child’s awe. Your mother’s breath was sour and sweet, like a dream interrupted halfway through. She held you by the ribs as comets shot across the sky. It is a comfort to know that once, you were little enough to be cradled. Once, there was only wheatgrass and wonder, the earth turning ordinary beneath the train of your spine.
*
You begin to cry.
Thoughtless, wordless. You cry like it is the last thing you will ever do, which maybe it is. You cry until you are not yourself anymore, until the sob has overtaken your body and transformed you mercifully into someone, anyone else. You cry for your Theory. For the person you were when you woke up this morning. You cry for the number of breaths you will not take, for the mornings you will not squint into the sun, the long drives you will not steer down mountain roads, the whiskey that will not sting your throat. Forty-six years you have lived, and all of it, for what. For this.
When it’s over, you straighten. You wipe your eyes, blow your nose onto the floor in a gleaming puddle. Though you refuse to look at the clock on the wall, you can feel them ticking by, slipping effortlessly from the room. Those seconds. You want to hold on to each one, to feel the texture of your life as it slinks regretfully away.
*
It is a surprise, but the inevitable kind, when you hear the footsteps ascending from the mouth of the hall.
It is time.
Vaguely, you want to fight. You want to kick and scream in the name of the things you will lose, but that sounds grueling, and painful, and useless. Down the hall, the footsteps shuffle louder. The tie-down team. Six trained prison officials will come for you, and they will come now. You have known, of course, that this moment would arrive, but you did not expect it to feel so trivial, just another second blending with the millions that make up your insignificant little life.
You hear the approach. The patter of fate, arriving to sweep you away.
You lift your chin to the sound.
Lavender
Now
Lavender bends over the laundry tub. Her knees are bare and dusty, sore from crouching in the dirt. Afternoon brightens over the Sequoia building. Inside, the women are washing the lunch dishes, bickering over the clang of pots and pans. Beyond the laundry basin, Lavender can see the silhouetting crest of the mountains, hazy wild citrus in the full day’s light. At the bottom of the hill, Sunshine bends over the vegetable garden in her wide straw hat. Lavender is sixty-three years old now, and she does not believe in happiness, not as a pure or categoric thing. But she does believe in the future, and she can see it now, stretching luxurious down the mountain, across the rippling grass. Sunshine pulls a zucchini from the vine, her body like a map, the ridges and peaks so carefully charted.
The sound begins soft at first, barely discernible. Lavender sits straight, wondering if she’s imagined it. She stretches to make it out—there. A whine, a gasp. An animal, dying in the gut of the woods. Lavender goes still, hovering with sudsy arms over the basin. The whimper deepens.
Something is in pain.
She tilts her head.
She listens.
Saffy
Now
Saffy steps from the shower. The mirror is cloudy—even through the condensation, the weight of this night sits heavy on her shoulders. Her funeral outfit is laid out on the bed, like a weary person flopped down exhausted. Saffy has worn this black dress to hundreds of funerals, her hair pulled into an authoritative bun. It feels too crisp tonight, too formal.
She wonders, vaguely, what Ansel is doing now. Eating his last meal or staring up at a blank gray ceiling. She hopes the cell is cold, she hopes his thoughts are haunting—she hopes, of course, that he is sorry. That he is afraid. As the sun sinks through the blinds, Saffy is grateful that Texas is so far away, that soon he will be somewhere else entirely, or maybe nowhere at all.
*
Saffy’s phone pings as she’s drying her hair.
Blue Harrison.
I’m here, the text reads. It’s happening soon.
Saffy still stops by the Blue House occasionally. She orders a tuna melt, chats with Rachel at the bar. When Ansel wrote to invite her to the execution, Blue called the station—I think I want to go, she’d said, almost a whisper. I think I want to be there. Saffy wasn’t sure exactly why Blue had dialed her, but she could hear a quaking in the girl’s voice. Blue was asking for permission. For some kind of acknowledgment. Saffy remembered how Ansel had looked as a boy, vulnerable and unstable, broken but not yet gone, his choices still his own to make. Ansel was bad, and he would die for it—but Saffy knew, along with Blue, that he was other things, too.