Give Me The Chair

“If you’ll sign here please, sir.”

My hands shook so violently I had trouble gripping the pen. I scrawled my name at the bottom of the page for the last time.

I didn’t bother to read the text. It was just a long, candy-coated way of saying, “You’re going to be killed and you’re letting us do it.”

I was furious at myself for allowing this to happen. I should have gotten a lawyer, I should have tried to find more evidence that I was innocent, that I did not stab her. I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Should have, should have. As if the court cared. I was just another statistic in the executed criminals’ ranks.

Just another fucking statistic.

I stood up and two security officers handcuffed me. As if it was really necessary. I was already beaten; why should a dead man try and run from his fate?

My heart pounded madly somewhere deep inside my chest; it seemed to know as well as my brain that it only had so many beats left inside it. The officers dragged me forward, and my weary, numb legs followed without a care.

This was the end. I just couldn’t accept it. It shouldn’t be happening; it shouldn’t. I was just twenty-four, for God’s sake, I had my entire life ahead of me! I had a wife at home, and a two-year old daughter who didn’t know why Daddy was going to sleep for a long, long time.

My job, my family, my life’s memories swam in front of me as they took me into a sterilized white chamber. It reminded me of a laboratory. There wasn’t a speck of dust in the place.

Just a chair. An electric chair.

Off to the side there was a row of windows. A doctor stood there watching austerely, glaring at attention.

And then there was my wife, my beautiful Amy, crying behind a crumpled tissue. I could hear her wailing, and it was all I could do not to run to her and comfort her; to tell her it would be all right, that I’d see her again, somehow.

But I might not.

We’d been together since high school, that hazy period of cliques, sex and homework. But the two of us had always been true, always. True love, the kind in movies, the kind that never dies. And my baby girl had been the best thing that had ever happened to me, but now I was leaving her alone before she even learned my name.

I hated myself for bringing this upon them.

I was shoved roughly into the dreaded chair. Wires flopped aimlessly around me, some like worms, and others like anacondas poised to strangle and kill.

One of the officers moved forward and silently attached clamps—the electrodes—to my head and my left leg. I winced as they snapped around my skin. He left the room, not once glancing back. I never even saw his face.

Another doctor stood in front of me, his straight posture and stance mocking, but his eyes softened and almost pitying. He stood and looked the way a person watches the calves taken to the slaughterhouse.

“Any last words?” He fingered the switch he held in his hands; a black box of death.

I swallowed.

“Please, don’t do this. I’m innocent.”

“No, you're not," he snapped back lazily.

That made me snap. I screamed and thrashed against the belt holding me down, and tears poured down my face.

“NO! NO! You don’t know what you’re doing! I didn’t do it! I didn’t fucking do it!”

On the other side of the window, I just barely heard my wife let out another scream of torture and then turn away. It broke my heart to see.

I stopped fighting. My body collapsed in a sigh against the bonds that held me. I gazed up helplessly at the man who would end my life.

“I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”

It was bitterly ironic for me to say that. Those were Ted Bundy’s last words, too.

The doctor seemed to realize it, and he formed a half-smirk on the edge of his lips. He reached toward the button that would be my ending, my closed curtain.

I’ll see you all in heaven.

His fingers flipped the switch.

In a billionth of a second, I was on fire, I was screaming, I was in pain too awful to comprehend.

Dead, dead, dead!

***

I couldn’t bear to look at my husband’s charred body as they carted him away. I couldn’t stand seeing his flesh, burnt, twisted and black, twisted off like cardboard from the hellish machine, still smoking from the impact. All I could feel was my rage, coated with sadness and tragedy.

There is nothing crueler than the death of an innocent.

They gave me his death certificate. As if I needed any more proof, any other final slap and spit in the face.

As I walked out, I saw one of the doctors, masked like the coward he was. He was the only one in the lobby with me.

As I walked out, I noticed a forgotten scalpel from the surgery ward lying on the floor.

And as I walked out, that doctor was sprawled on the tile, angry red blood spurting from the scalpel lodged in his chest.