*The characters and events in this parable are entirely fictional.
The Demise of the Executioner
Death came for the executioner the way it comes for everyone.
He had spent decades watching others cross over. Forty-seven men and women. He had memorized their final breaths. He knew the exact second when life leaves the body…that moment when the eyes go somewhere else. He thought he understood it.
He didn’t understand anything.
The Chamber
He opened his eyes to a room he recognized. The chamber. The same pale green walls. The same fluorescent hum. The same gurney bolted to the floor.
He was strapped to it.
He could feel the leather on his wrists. He could smell the antiseptic and something else underneath it…that smell the cleaning crew could never get out. He used to think he was imagining it. Now he knew.
“No,” he whispered.
“Isn’t what?”
He turned his head and there was Marcus Williams. Execution number twenty-three. A Tuesday in October. They had trouble finding a vein that day. The executioner remembered standing there watching them dig. Dig and dig. Marcus never made a sound.
Orange jumpsuit. Shaved head. That tired look the dying get.
“Marcus. I was just doing my job.”
“I know.”
“The courts decided. The juries. The state. I just…”
“I know.”
Marcus sat down. Folded his hands the way he had when he prayed before they pushed the plunger. The executioner remembered that too. Watching this man pray for the men about to kill him.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Marcus said. “I need to ask you something.”
The executioner didn’t say anything.
“After me there were twenty-four more. I watched you do it twenty-four more times. Check the lines. Mix the chemicals. Give the nod. I watched you go home after. I watched you sit in your truck in the driveway for an hour before you could go inside.”
The executioner’s eyes went wet. He had forgotten anyone could see that.
“I watched you take a shower so hot it burned you. I watched you pour the drink. I watched you sit in front of the television not seeing anything.”
Marcus leaned close. His breath was cold.
“Why did you keep killing people?”
The executioner opened his mouth and nothing came out. All those words he had practiced. Lawful orders. The system. One small part. They had made so much sense when he was standing. They were nothing now.
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “I didn’t think you did.”
He stood. Walked to the door. Stopped.
“Someone else wants to ask you.”
The Victim
She was younger than he remembered from the photos.
Rebecca Torres. Nineteen years old. Night shift at a gas station. Paying for nursing school. Marcus Williams shot her for forty-three dollars and a pack of cigarettes. She bled out on the floor next to the candy aisle. The Snickers were on sale.
The executioner had looked at her picture before every execution Marcus was on the calendar. He had needed her face to do it.
“Rebecca. I’m so sorry for what happened to you.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Just looked at him. Then:
“Why did you keep killing people?”
His chest caved.
“For you,” he said. “I did it for you. For justice…”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“He took your life.”
“And you took his. Then you took another one. And another. Forty-seven people. You put them through what I went through in that gas station and you did it in my name.”
He was crying now. The tears ran sideways into his ears. He couldn’t wipe them.
“I never wanted more death,” she said. “I wanted to live. I wanted to be a nurse. I wanted to hold people’s hands when they were scared and tell them it was going to be okay. I was twenty credits away.”
She stopped. Looked at the wall.
“I think about those twenty credits a lot.”
“I thought I was honoring you.”
“You were burying me. Every execution you buried me deeper. You made my death into a bottomless pit and you just kept throwing bodies in.”
She sat down.
“Did it bring me back?”
“No.”
“Did it help my mama?”
“No.”
“Did it stop the next one? The next robbery? The next girl working nights?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
He didn’t have an answer. He had never had an answer. He had just kept showing up.
The Forty-Seven
Then… The gurney was gone. The straps. The room.
He just sat there in the gray nothing.
They were there. All of them. Forty-seven. He could see their faces now. The ones who cried. The ones who screamed verses at him. The ones who went limp. The ones who looked at him and said thank you like he was doing them a favor. He had never understood that. He still didn’t.
One of them…number thirty-one, a woman named Darlene who had killed her husband with a hammer…she was standing closest. He remembered that she had begged for her life.
They weren’t angry. That was the thing. He almost wished they were.
They were just waiting. Waiting for him to walk toward them. To sit down. To finally see them as something other than what he had made them…problems to be solved with chemicals and silence.
He took a step.
It was the hardest thing he had ever done.
The Living
I don’t know what happens to the souls of executioners when they die.
I don’t know if there’s a room. A gurney with their name on it. A line of the dead waiting to ask questions that don’t have answers.
But I know the questions don’t wait.
They’re already here.
It Doesn’t Have to Happen
For every corrections officer who has walked into that room. For every one scheduled to walk in next month or next year. The questions are already here.
“Why do you keep killing people?”
You can answer now. In this life. Before the gray nothing. Before the faces.
You can just stop…and save your soul in the process.
*
*
*If you would like to support the Execution Intervention Project (the organization that financially supports Dr. Hood’s work), click here.
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