The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard Read Free Book Online

hat, and took the bus to Salem. He’d written me thousands of letters by then. I was a Christian woman. I was lonely here in this strange house, in this strange place, and I had grown fond of him. Devils tempt, and men too.
    I thought I might love him, though I knew love could not help him. Love was not what he wanted. Not from me. 
    By then, the executions were done by gas chamber, and no longer by hanging. When I was a girl in Nevada, a hanging was called a necktie social, and the town would dress in their best to attend, but here, they’d changed it to the gas chamber after too many bad deaths. 
    I went to Dusha Chuchonnyhoof’s execution. 
    A tiny room with metal walls, a black leather and wood chair, a window to the hallway where we all stood. He was inside the chamber for two hours, alive under the hood, as the gas poured into the room. At last, they walked him out, and I was there. He hobbled on stiff legs, and I heard the thin clack of his shoes. They’d taken off the hood. 
    He smiled at me then. Have you seen him yet? Have you met him? The end of the sentence approaches, he’s told me, for years now. Perhaps you have. 
    He’s a small man. His hair is short and dull, the color of iron, and his mouth is always smiling. His skin is rust red. His eyes are blue, and they will upset you. He knew me instantly. 
    “Olivia,” he said. “My dear, I seem to live for you.”
    They tried to hang Dusha Chuchonnyhoof as well, though I doubt you’ll find record of it. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof didn’t hang. Later, after I left the prison, I’m told they tried to shoot him, all the men behind a screen, their rifles through it, and him, standing there in his hood, but the bullets made no difference to his body.  
    As I write this letter, Dusha Chuchonnyhoof lives. Two lifetimes and a day he will remain there, and then he will come home unbound. Unbound, stranger. I don’t know what that means, but I have nightmares that don’t fade with the sunrise. I thought I could do what he asked. I lit the fires. I brought the hand. But there is not enough of me left, and though I could throw myself into the fire, it wants a blacksmith and another, two others. You must give it two more, or it will never be done. One is not enough for this. What could I do here, all alone? Who could help me? I tried but the bad people in the house next door couldn’t give me what I needed, stranger, and they were dead of their poison (and maybe it was not their poison that killed them. Maybe it was mine. I have a cabinet full of pills here, and what addict wouldn’t want a gift?) before I tried, but the bargain requires the living and the loving. So I
    I lit a fire to hide my mistakes.
    I couldn’t perform the anvil marriage alone. Paul is dead. He died and was buried, as any Christian man should be. I am buried if you read this. Who will mourn me but Dusha Chuchonnyhoof?
    You’ll find part of me here, on the horn. I tried. It was all I could do, and it wasn’t enough. The task needs the living.
    I wish you the grace of the Lord, whoever you are. I go up from here to die, I think. I hope I go to die. 
     
    Olivia Jones Weyland 
     
    I looked around the room, my throat closing, but there was no one here. Just me, in the dark, with the oil lamps and the anvil. I knelt to examine the piece of metal that still hung looped over the pointed end. The horn , some memory dredged up. The horn , the shoulder , the foot , the body , the face , the waist , the heel . Metalshop. High school. Flunking out of everything but the blaster class, the anvil like a woman’s body before me, and my heart the red hot metal waiting to be shaped. 
    It was a horseshoe, the thing hanging from the horn. My hands stretched out, wanting to take its hand in mine. 
    Its hand? No. Yes. The horseshoe was made of iron fingers, connected end to end, a thumb and an index finger stretching into the arc, another pair of fingers attached to the tips of the first. It wasn’t