Notes on an Execution

You don't need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.

Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Greif was a loneliness that felt like a planet.

She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside-some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.

No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.

I wonder about choices. How we resent them, and how we regret them—even as we watch them grow.

...and she thought 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.

A thousand miles away, justice is being served—but justice, Saffy thinks, is supposed to feel like more. Justice is supposed to be an anchor, an answer. She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction.

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.

Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.

In most of your memories, your mother is gone. And before she is gone, always, she is leaving.

Sometimes you are certain this is all you are made of: a fleeting instant between action and inaction. Doing something, or not. Where is the difference, you wonder? Where is the choice. Where is the line, between stillness and motion?

Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy.

Give yourself a moment every day, Harmony had suggested once in group therapy. A single moment in which you are absolved of all responsibility. How much responsibility could a person hold, Lavender wondered. How much, before the overflow?

I have this idea. This theory, I guess. 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.

Lavender knew, then, that the world was a forgiving place. That every horror she had lived or caused could be balanced with such gutting kindness. It would be a tragedy, she thought—inhumane—if we were defined only by the things we left behind.

We are all bad, and we are all good, and no one should be condemned to one or the other. But if good can be tainted with the bad that comes after, then where do you place it? How do you count it? How much is it really worth?

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.

Tragedy had a texture. A knot, begging to be unraveled.

But Saffy knew about catastrophe. It was arbitrary. A thing descended from nowhere, pointed a bony finger, and smirked. As if to say: I choose you.

Felix Culpa, her mother had written. The happy fault. The horrible thing that leads to the good.

Sister love was like food, or air, or memory itself. It was molecular. The very stuff of her.

Saffy wondered about her own internal compass, the needle that kept her on this path, stopped her from wandering or regressing or giving up entirely. It scared her to realize there was no compass. There were only days and the choices she made within them

It was irresistible: the almost.

She glimpsed that same craving in Jenny Fisk—an ask, for suffering. It was the scariest thing about being a woman. It was hardwired, ageless, the part that knew you could have the good without the hurt, but it wouldn’t be nearly as exquisite.

It seemed, then, that mothering did not have to be so rigid. There was no arc to it, no frame through which it ended or began. Mothering could be as simple as this: a woman and her very own blood, breathing in tandem through the darkest heart of night. *

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.

Just another bad man, his head hung morose as he pled with the jury. This job was getting to her. Not the bodies, or the missing children, or the rampant opioids. It was this. Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.

It is possible, looking at the ocean, to believe it never ends.

It would be a tragedy, she thought—inhumane—if we were defined only by the things we left behind.

You can do the vilest thing. It’s not so hard, to be bad. Evil isn’t something you can pinpoint or hold, cradle or banish. Evil hides, sly and invisible, in the corners of everything else.