The Endarkenment

Meditations on the Death Penalty

27 Meditations on the Death Penalty Lethal injection is the pits—that damn doctor slapping my forearm, like he’s fishing for blood vessels, squeezing my wrist, trying to make a vein surface, like I’m a pond strapped to a gurney, and he’s floating over me in a white rowboat, and the curtain rises: a line of frozen faces behind glass, as he squirts the lullaby serum into me. Oh, maybe if one of them read me a bedtime story—anything but that specimen staring. * The problem with a firing squad is the doctor beforehand, locating my heart with a stethoscope and taping a white, circular slither of cloth over the beat, like I’m some kind of dart board. And those sandbags piled at my feet: emptied-out hourglasses into which my blood will seep. Oh, maybe if I could aim my mouth so my last breath rushed out with such force that it splashed against the cheeks of those guys pointing the loaded pieces of punctuation at me. * Electrocution might be ok, outdoors, on a moonless night, 28 so I’m the only thing visible for miles, like I’m a storm over Lago de Atitlán, and the eternity jolt is a whole summer of lightning bolts compressed into a single instant. But the shaving of my body hair, and all those weird belts, and that electrode dunce cap, and the moist sponge patted against my temples, so the current ricochets through me. And why the blindfold? Can’t I just promise to keep my eyes closed, as my skin stretches like a party balloon blown to the point of breaking, intestines crackling like bacon? * I guess the gallows aren’t so bad. At least it’s out in nature, it’s theatrical: the executioner with his little hood, the whole town bunched around waiting for my last breath to flap out from my throat, like a blue parakeet out of a chimney, when the plank vanishes, the boiled rope extends, and snap—mouth flashing open, body jangling like a wind chime, feet running through the air, as if there’s somewhere important I need to be. * ...