Judge says you’ll burn eventually, and I tell him we all burn under the sun. He says you’ll pay in the afterlife, and I tell him he can put the coins on my eyes if he likes. He claims that all my sins will be visited upon me tenfold and more once I pass beyond the grave, but before I can reply they are dragging me out a side door from the courtroom while a few cameras flash and some woman throws her underwear onto the witness stand. It is red and bright and I want to put it in my mouth, swallow it whole, but then they have a bag over my head so no one will recognize me outside. The bag tastes like onions and I let them press it against my lips. The burlap is sharp and it breaks tender skin around my nose where one of the guards clubbed me before the sentencing. I let it filter into my body, the taste of onions swimming in my bloodstream, coursing through my face. My eyes are sweating and I let them stream down my cheeks until they drip into my teeth and down my barren throat.

Man across from me in the van wants to know why I did it. He wants to know if it’s all true. The bag is still over my head and he thinks I can’t hear him so the man asks his questions again. He asks if I noticed the footprints I left behind. He asks what it felt like when the last of them lay still in my hands, he asks if I would do it again and he wants an answer. I tell him there ain’t nothing I could change now, there’s no point in travelling back to rearrange my crimes, my deeds. He asks me what I thought I was doing with the garden shears, and I tell him I was pruning. I was pruning everything in sight. I was trying to cut away the dead bits, and he says they were alive, but I know what I saw inside the hospital and I tell him that ain’t living. That ain’t nothing. He says those kids, they had families, and I tell him in five years I never saw a visitor walking down those halls. No mommas or poppas. He wants to ask me more, but the brakes jolt us both onto the floor and all I can see is burlap and a lighter shade of dark when they crank open the metal door—like emerging from the bottom of a swamp.

The string around my neck is taut and it clenches my throat as they drag me out into the dust. The guard holds my wrists together and kicks out my legs. I tumble to the ground and I feel boots against my head and my kidneys and the tiny bones inside my feet, the ones that give you balance, the ones you can’t fix once they are broken. They beat the bottoms of my feet with clubs and sticks. I howl in my bag, but I do not tell them to stop. Each rib that cracks reminds me of the judge and all the words he spat down on me in the courtroom. There are letters in my cell calling me the devil of Carlton County, calling me the spawn of some insidious seed the devil must have planted inside my mother. I keep them all in bundles above my bunk as a reminder that not everyone understands. Some of them are just screeches of static rubbed onto the page like garbled radio transmissions, all their fears bubbling out like foam from a rabid dog or a corpse left out in the sun. Another boot cracks against my nose and the inside of the bag goes black and moist. The air is filled with onions and rust.

You can’t take none of it back. Not the thirty years spent trimming hedges and maintaining the lawns, not the nights spent watching over their experiments in the wards. There’s a lot of things you can do to a body when the mind begins to go. The nails and hair keep growing, but the muscles grow all soft. Something inside begins to rot. You can leave it be, of course. Let things take their natural path, but none of this was natural. All the white coats were like kids poking at roadkill with a stick, probing flesh and brain and so much more inside that ward.

I know in the morning they’ll bring the doctor for me, they’ll tell him to measure my heart rate, tell him to test my reflexes, and he will be the one who places the stethoscope beneath my shirt to announce that I am gone, that I am dust and smoke and all the fearsome things they said I was and always will be.

I took those shears into their garden. I took my tools and I did my work like any other day. I did my work for Carlton County and for all the kids they’d dragged out here into this hole, with its polished floors and diplomas on the walls. I cleaned out the broken things and put them into bags with the leaves and the roots and all the leftover bits from beneath the hedges. I set the fires down in the basement where the coal was kept and I let the laws of nature take their course. Make them into loam, make them into soil. Let the worms pick at what is left, as long as there are no scalpels, no stitches, no attempts to hide the crime. Let the beetles do their work.

Judge says I will burn like those kids did once I’m tied to the chair with this bag over my head, but I know that ain’t true. I will feel it when I pass and thank them for the sensation as I go.