POLUNSKY UNIT (DEATH ROW)
LIVINGSTON, TEXAS 77351
USA
August 1
Dear Mr. S. Harris,
Ignore the blob of red in the top left corner. It’s jam, not blood, though I don’t think I need to tell you the difference. It wasn’t your wife’s jam the police found on your shoe.
The jam in the corner’s from my sandwich. Homemade raspberry. Gran made it. She’s been dead seven years, and making that jam was the last thing she did. Sort of. If you ignore the weeks she spent in the hospital attached to one of those heart things that goes beep beep if you’re lucky or beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep if you’re not. That was the sound echoing around the hospital room seven years ago. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. My little sister was born six months later, and Dad named her after Gran. Dorothy Constance. When Dad stopped grieving, he decided to shorten it. My sister is small and round so we ended up calling her Dot.
My other sister, Soph, is ten. They’ve both got long blond hair and green eyes and pointy noses, but Soph is tall and thin and darker-skinned, like Dot’s been rolled out and crisped in the oven for ten minutes. I’m different. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Medium height. Medium weight. Ordinary, I suppose. To look at me, you’d never guess my secret.
I struggled to eat the sandwich in the end. The jam wasn’t rotten or anything, because it lasts for years in sterilized jars. At least that’s what Dad says when Mum turns up her nose. It’s pointy, too. Her hair’s the same color as my sisters’ but shorter and a bit wavy. Dad’s is more like mine, except with gray bits above his ears, and he’s got this thing called heterochromia, which means one eye’s brown but the other’s lighter. Blue if it’s bright outside, gray if it’s overcast. The sky in a socket, I once said, and Dad got these dimples right in the middle of his cheeks, and I don’t know if any of this really matters, but I suppose it’s good to give you a picture of my family before I tell you what I came in here to say.
Because I am going to say it. I’m not sitting in this shed for the fun of it. It’s bloody freezing and Mum would kill me if she knew I was out of bed, but it’s a good place to write this letter, hidden away behind some trees. Don’t ask me what type, but they’ve got big leaves that are rustling in the breeze. Shhhhwiiishhh. Actually, that sounds nothing like them.
There’s jam on my fingers so the pen’s sticky. I bet the cats’ whiskers are, too. Lloyd and Webber meowed as if they couldn’t quite believe their luck that the sky was raining sandwiches when I chucked it over the hedge. I wasn’t hungry anymore. In actual fact I never was, and if I’m being honest, I only made the sandwich in the first place to put off starting this letter. No offense or anything Mr. Harris. It’s just difficult. And I’m tired. I haven’t really slept since May 1.
There’s no danger of me dropping off in here. The box of tiles is digging into my thighs, and a draft is blowing through a gap underneath the shed door. I need to get a move on because, just my luck, the flashlight is running out of battery. I tried holding it between my teeth, but my jaw started to ache so now it’s balancing near a spiderweb on the windowsill. I don’t normally sit in the shed, especially not at 2 AM, but tonight the voice in my head is louder than ever before. The images are more real, and my pulse is racing racing racing, and I bet if my heart was attached to one of those hospital things, all the fast thumping would break it.
When I got out of bed, my pajama top was sticking to my back, and my mouth was drier than probably a desert. That’s when I put on my bathrobe and tiptoed outside because I knew it was time to write this letter. I can’t keep it in anymore. I have to tell someone, and you’re the person I chose.
I got your contact details off a Death Row website, and I found the website because of a nun, and that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d write, but then my life isn’t exactly turning out the way I’d imagined. There was a picture of you looking friendly for someone in an orange jumpsuit with a shaved head, thick glasses, and a scar down one cheek. Yours wasn’t the only profile I clicked on. There are hundreds of criminals who want pen pals. Hundreds. But you stood out. All that stuff about your family disowning you so you haven’t had any letters for eleven entire years. All that stuff about your guilt.
Not that I believe in God, but I went to confession to get rid of my guilt after triple-checking on Wikipedia that the priest wouldn’t be able to say anything to the police. But when I sat down in the booth and saw his silhouette through the grille, I couldn’t speak. There I was, about to confess to a man who’d never done anything wrong in his life, except for maybe having an extra sip of Communion wine on a bad day. Unless he was one of those priests who abuse children, in which case he would have known all about sin, but I couldn’t be sure so I didn’t risk it.
You’re much safer. And you sort of remind me of Harry Potter to be honest. I loved those books when I was little. I can’t remember when the first one came out, if it was before or after your murder trial, but anyway in case you’re confused Harry Potter has a scar and glasses and you have a scar and glasses, and he never got any mail, either. But then all of a sudden he received a mysterious letter saying he was a wizard and his life was miraculously transformed.
Now, you’re probably reading this in your cell thinking, I wish this letter was about to tell me I had magical powers, and if the website is anything to go by, I bet you’re imagining healing every single one of those stab wounds in your wife. Well, sorry to disappoint you and all that, but I’m just an ordinary teenage girl, not the headmaster of a School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Trust me, though, if this pen was a wand, then I’d give you the magic to bring your wife right back to life, because that is the thing we have in common.
I know what it’s like.
Mine wasn’t a woman. Mine was a boy. And I killed him three months ago exactly.
Do you want to know the worst thing? I got away with it. No one’s found out that I’m responsible. No one has a clue and I’m walking around saying all the right things and doing all the right stuff, but inside I’m sort of screaming. I daren’t tell Mum or Dad or my sisters, because I don’t want to be disowned and I don’t want to go to prison, even though I deserve it. So you see Mr. Harris I’m less brave than you, so don’t feel too bad when you go for the lethal injection, which I wouldn’t worry about, because when my dog was put to sleep, it really did look peaceful. The website says you’ll never forgive yourself, but at least now you know there are people in the world far worse than you. You had the guts to own up to your mistake, but I’m too much of a coward even to reveal my real identity in a letter.
So yeah, you can call me Zoe. And let’s pretend I live on Fiction Road, I don’t know, somewhere near Bath, which is an old city with ancient buildings and lots of weekend tourists taking pictures of the bridge. Everything else I’ll write will be the truth.
From, Zoe
1 Fiction Road
Bath, UK