Unsuspected Intimacy

A dense fog shrouded the facility and obscured the windows along its brick facade. The main building stood monolithic behind foreboding chain-link framed in razor wire. The same journalist assigned to cover the criminal trial had to brave the autumn chill to report on the late-night execution. He drew this lot as a cub reporter for a news outlet that covered such morbid proceedings but stayed warm inside the News 41 van as long as possible before setting up for a live shot outside the prison barrier.

Protesters drew attention – those who oppose the death penalty and supported the Reynolds’ family juxtaposed with others who wanted their brand of justice done. They staked claim on opposite sides of the main driveway and stomped around under flood lights bright enough to illuminate a sports stadium. Their signs galvanized opposing positions. Placards on the right heralded, “Down with the death penalty.” Others on the left read, “An Eye for An Eye” and “Good Riddance,” as their owners chanted, “Justice for Gwen, Justice for Gwen” outside the prison’s formidable gates.

Gwen Brown’s family sat undetected and anonymous inside a dark sedan parked on grass aligning the drive. The media spotlight cast upon them already took its toll without adding more undue probing.

Hoards of hard-line vigilantees rehashed the details of how Reynolds sadistically killed the teenage girl. A youth himself at the time, Timothy Wayne Reynolds had been defended on the basis of a crime of passion. A jilted lover. An especially humiliating break-up. A previous closed-head injury suffered in a football game the prior week that defense lawyers said incapacitated him from responsibility for his crime.

People say, “Dead men tell no tales.” The dead can’t speak of atrocities against them. The drug that accidentally killed the King of Pop, Proponol, would be used to take one of his fans to that person’s final rest.

The frenzied folks outside never knew of the turmoil within those confines. “We can’t let this leak to the press,” Warden Jenkins told his officers. “There’s enough negativity connected to these proceedings already.”

Reynolds ate his favorite meal of chicken fried steak with gravy and a piece of angel-food cake before receiving the priest’s last rites and taking those final surreal steps to his berth in a room with a one-way mirror. He couldn’t see those viewing his execution from the other side of that chamber, as his uncertain death became quite a drawn-out procedure, stretching out much longer than planned.

An unnamed pharmacy compounded a special recipe for lethal injection, even though human rights groups claimed that using untested drugs constituted ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The concoction took twice the usual timespan to work its way through his veins, twice the normal timespan. Reynolds’ heart pumped the poisonous mixture circuitously within his body until it rendered his vital organs inoperable. That same heart his adversaries insisted didn’t exist.

The man turned toward his withered image in the mirror and mouthed the words, “I love you,” in hopes the receiver would get his message. At the last moment, a panic spread through Reynolds’ body pinioned to the gurney, and he struggled against the straps that bound his wrists when the masked clinician approached him with a syringe clasped in gloved hands.

The woman who named him on June 15, 1962 at John Franklin Memorial Hospital in Tulumqua, Alabama sat sobbing on the other side of the transparent wall. She wailed painfully when her boy closed his eyes for the last time.

A satellite feed sent out a signal to major network with the report, “State officials brought an embittered battle from 1979 to a final close tonight as 54-year old Timothy Wayne Reynolds was executed for the crime of aggravated capital murder. The county coroner pronounced him dead at 12:15.”

Outside the gates, the mother of Gwen Elisabeth Brown cried into her cupped hands. She felt both relief and sadness at the news.

Inspiration Monday prompt – uncertain death

 

 

 

Image: “Razorwire” by Joi Ito via Flickr