The Girl Who Hated God by Madison Grimmer
I am no longer allowed to be a part of this world. I see emptiness in a scarred prison mirror. A face distorted and bloated from starch in the food.
“When will they do her in?” the guards say conversationally as they traipse past my cell every day and night. The inmates here tell me that prayer helps, but I have yet to find an existing god somewhere. If he’s here, he’s hiding from me. I never hear him.
The state of Washington decided to give me the death penalty. I will die on June 21, 1986. Madison Grimmer is my name, and I’m twenty-seven years old. I have one more day until I am laid to sleep, an object of skin and bones to bury in the ground. They want to cleave me open and leave me dying beneath the moon. Instead, they will prick me with a needle filled with potassium chloride. I am not afraid of this.
I could never see god through the flames I set to the police department. On the same day I torched their headquarters, I killed Mercy Reed, a nine-year-old neighbor who lived across the street from my apartment. I threw a Molotov cocktail at the police department down the street, where five cops lost their lives. I remember all of this with a placid smile on my face. I also remember what a fellow inmate told me about how cops watch women take their showers with waterproof hidden cameras set up inside the shower heads. I thought that I heard them condemn my figure once, their voices drifting through the pouring water.
I was always trouble. Maybe that’s why they were on to me. Every time I tried to pray, silence bled from the sky.
I was twenty years old when I slit Mercy Reed’s throat in the shrubbery by our apartments. I was high on angel dust, blood on my hands, watching the life leave Mercy’s body, the fiery remains of the police station collapsing. One officer, who was lucky enough to be outside of the catastrophe in the building restrained me and handcuffed me.
“You let her die!” I screamed in his tired face. I was referring to my twin sister, Aurora. She was my confidante and my only friend. She was taken by an unseen perpetrator when we were seventeen. Her body turned up in the river, tossed there by some vagabond. I was sick of the police losing interest in the investigation of Aurora’s death. It was a case they couldn’t solve. As for Mercy Reed, she went under my knife after her taunting, sing-song voice rang out, “Your sister is dead!”
How she knew was a mystery to me. When I heard her mention Aurora’s death, the PCP was shooting through my veins like a series of bullets. Scintillas of red lights fell from the sky and onto the ground. I stubbed out my cigarette, pulled a knife out from inside my bra, and backed her into the bushes. She fell backward with a cry of alarm. Before she could say more, I slashed her throat. I left her there for dead under the red-berried bushes. Then I went into my kitchen to make a Molotov cocktail with a rag, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, and some gasoline. I was working at the gas station before my incarceration. On the day of my killings, I had time off from work. I’m glad to never have to see the place again and the same haggard customers buying cigarettes, beer, antacids, Bic lighters and packaged snack cakes. I was tired of my boss telling me to lose my attitude.
I can’t get the memory of the flames out of my head, nor can I forget the blood spurting from Mercy’s neck. I am scheduled to die tomorrow. Aurora, I’ll be seeing you soon.
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On Halloween, on the eve of our seventeenth birthday, Aurora vanished into the cool breeze and icy wind without a trace. The police found her a week later, curled up on the river’s rocks, her pink shirt snagged on a twig. I will never forget her ability to read Tarot cards, to play “Moonlight Sonata” on a piano, to almost read the minds of other people.
On the Halloween before the night Aurora went missing, I asked her to read the fortune of a drunken homeless man that I found passed out at a bus stop. The Devil was the first card she put down. I forgot about what the next two cards were. If anything is the Devil, alcoholism is. I don’t know how Aurora ended up dead in the river and no one will ever find her killer. For many years, it has hurt to explain how this makes me feel. Now, I feel a semblance of peace circling me.
I know I’ll go wherever the forgotten dead go, to where Aurora is waiting. Only in death will I find the answer to what happened to my sister.
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It’s June 21. The needle is slipping into my vein, held by a smiling nurse. No pain fills my body or mind. Just serenity and tranquilizing peace. The flourescent ceiling light turns into a sun. The cinderblock walls become the sky.
