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No. 128
Be grateful, thank your ancestors, thank your stars, that you're not being strapped down in the metal chair, that you're not seeing those two distinct sharp-edged expressions, either one or the other, on the faces of the people watching through the glass, either studied indifference or a fascination that's less than pornographic but not so very much less, and there are people murmuring to you just as if they care that you're about to be choked to death with chemicals, but they don't, not really, they don't actually care and they won't think about it after tomorrow or the next day, and the fact, the unblemished, untarnished certainty that you and only you have, that you're innocent, you really are innocent, not "they all say they're innocent," but authentically innocent, and that not only will it be believed that you raped and strangled two women whom you never saw or heard of till you were arrested for supposedly doing it, after someone stole your car and used it in the crime, someone who looks a little like you; not only will it be believed by the public, by history, that you were a murderer, but your wife, your children, your father and mother will believe that you are guilty, even though they made cardboard protestations to the contrary, ultimately they will believe it, and so the children will blame you for abandoning them, and no one will ever be truly sorry, except maybe the children, who will also hate you, no one will be sorry that you are now hearing the sound of the chamber door clicking shut, the last time you will hear a door shut, that you are hearing the sound of the cyanide capsules hitting the bucket to release the poison into the air; no one will really, not really care that you have only one last clean breath in your lungs as you shake and choke and shake and die knowing you are innocent and being killed for nothing. Be grateful, show some gratitude: that could have been you. And it's not.
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