30

She imagined walking before the firing squad, her juicy satin pumps pulling her towards them, her red lined mouth, her red smudged teeth, set like a lady’s in an expression of composure - demure. She imagined a huge gust of wind blowing away her hood, her face stretching towards the sun, her dress, a lace frock flowing in the breeze, a magnificent tent. She imagined they were taken by her beauty. She imagined she called to them, Siren-like, one shrieking note, and it turned their hearts liquid, and their heads became balls of lust and their fingers betrayed them and they turned their guns to each other and the triggers quickened and stilled and they all lay before her in a miserable heap.

She imagined she was dragged, a laughing child from the yard and returned to her cell where she was not allowed to change, but remained in her lace for days until it became rank and scratched at her furiously. She imagined they brought her out finally and told her she would receive an injection, be strapped onto a gurney, and oh! she would kick madly until her pump flew across the room and into the tender eye of one of her Watchers, and she would shudder dramatically and finally lay still.

She imagined she was taken from the gurney and carried away, and in the hallway she leapt from the doctor’s arms, ran shrieking through death row, towards the sweet moving air. She imagined they caught her, dragged her back to her cell still dressed in her bedraggled lace, one pump remaining on her blistered foot. She imagined she stayed there for two hours while they faxed an emergency request across the border to Alabama where they hustled and rustled and sent the Spark of Death in a brown van, one-hour-and-twenty-minutes, faster than the devil.

She imagined the straps and wires, how she looked, a trussed whorey scarecrow. She cried this time, big sopping tears from her belly, and they made their way through a hole in the plastic covering the wiring and she exploded, blasting a hole in the roof and killing all five people in the room with her.

In 24 hours the fax would come back, stamped black. Denied. Hope was forgive and forget. Forgive her. The Governor. For.

Pinching pieces off of the Governor’s son with a blunt axe. In 1978.

When she was 15. After he had raped her.

And then came the trial. Forget, Governor. How you hired men to say she was a prostitute. How you called her an unforgivable slut, a callous demon. Forget, Governor. Forgive, Governor.