I volunteered for the firing squad because no woman had ever done it before. At least the assistant warden said he couldn’t remember any. The records were murky. They kept them classified and low-tech, and you needed a special key and four forms in order to get a look, which was probably for the best. If you signed up to shoot a man, would you want that fact broadcast indiscriminately to the world? I didn’t and still don’t. But there was something valuable about being first, something nice about being rare. I’d seen Sally Ride go into space. My brother and I drank Tang for breakfast, and you should’ve seen the way he looked at her. The assistant warden also said my marksmanship scores were higher than anyone else’s on the staff. He sounded surprised, which dulled the edges of the compliment. He told me the paper trail was invisible to the press, and the public would never know my name.

Word gets around in a prison, though. Smiley kept pestering me about it, for instance. His real name was Aaron. We only called him Smiley because he was always kind of leering at you in some off-center way. In the break room, he asked me if I wanted some inside info.

“Sure,” I said, pouring hot water, trying to avoid caffeine. 

“I don’t know much,” he said. “I tried to volunteer five, maybe six times, but must be something about me.”

“Okay.”

“But you know one of the guns has a blank, right? Four out of five. Twenty percent chance.”

Obviously, I knew that. Percy had walked in. He must have overheard. We’d been on two dates by then, but I hadn’t told him about the volunteering thing. It wasn’t deliberate. I just didn’t know how to begin. To explain burdens and representation, it all takes a little too much work. If he was who I thought he was, I figured he would understand. In the end, I think he did. He came over and stood by me. 

“What’s this now?” he said.

Smiley laughed. “Annie Oakley here’s gearing up,” he said, and Percy somehow knew what he meant. I caught a glance. Maybe a sigh. Its core was acceptance. Pain and frustration formed only the outer field. 

“They got this room where they keep the rifles,” Smiley went on. “They bring one of us in every hour, and we’re supposed to move them around some. You know, just rearrange. Not supposed to say a word about what we moved or where we moved it because the point is mixing up the cartridges. Keep things random and untraceable. You ever done that, Perce?”

“This last one,” Percy said, looking at me. “But I didn’t move anything. Figured how not choosing was also sort of a choice.” He went to sit down, and I joined him. The table was round and smooth plastic. The room smelled like a vending machine.

“I heard about a guard who tried to fix things once,” said Smiley. “He was in charge of loading the guns, and he put it out there that maybe no one should touch them. Do what our friend here did.” He pointed at Percy but didn’t stop eyeing the corners of my mouth. The things he was thinking, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know. “See, if you let them sit there unmoved, you’d know which one was a blank. Then, you’d know everybody’s share of the blame.”

I didn’t see much use in that, and I told Smiley as much. Percy stared up at the ceiling. The holes in the tiles formed feelings more than objects or patterns. One was for daring. Another seemed a little like glee.

“Aw, hon,” said Smiley, “You still ain’t understand this place, do you? Thing around here is, every piece of information has its price.” 

Percy flinched. I gripped my Styrofoam tighter. Looking back, I wish I’d thrown it in Smiley’s face.

+

The guy we were killing, they called him Ned. He’d murdered his parents. His mother was a firefighter. The father worked nights cleaning the hospital. Ned locked them both in a trailer and drove it out near the Timpanogos Caves. He pulled off the road. They said it was a real hot day. A red flag warning was in effect. Ned waited until dark and then lit a fire. The trailer was ashes in a matter of hours, minutes, instantly depending on who you believe. A couple of park rangers got third-degree burns. At trial, Ned’s lawyers tried to offer accounts of all kinds of neglect, but my brother said it never added up. The parents were pillars of the community. The words “hard-working” and “decent” rang through the TV, but I didn’t follow things too closely. I was barely nine, and never into grisly details besides. Ned chose the firing squad because he was afraid of needles. Death moved slower that way, and I guess he couldn’t handle it. His lawyers said he’d seen all kinds of cocktails go bad, and a botched injection is like electrified sci-fi horror, but everyone knew that was beyond Ned’s vocabulary. He could never induce emotion through words.

I tried not to think about the methods too much, the pomp and ritual. Execution time, it gets so everything borders on fetish. The rhythms get soothing. The details are signposts and never anything real. In keeping with that, I ignored all the talk about Ned’s last meal. It could have been barbecue. It could have been burgers. All I heard was he ate it in silence. At the end, they said he had a slice of pie left. I would’ve wanted banana cream. Anyway, somebody asked if he was going to eat it, and he said, “I’m saving that for next week,” which everyone claimed was only a morbid joke.

Execution chambers are like the back of a vet’s office. Or maybe a nursing home. When our mom started to lose her marbles, my brother and I took her to this place called Golden Memories. It had the same acoustics as a grade school lunchroom. It made us both feel ten years old. Whenever we went to see her, I smelled corn dogs and thought how memory is contextual and also genetic. I thought how, someday, I’d manage to forget even this.

They strapped Ned to a chair. A black hood over his head. The witnesses were off in another room, but my understanding was they couldn’t see any of us. The guns would be kept out of view. Apparently, one of Ned’s lawyers made a final motion to move the execution outdoors, maybe even to some kind of national park or monument, but this was dismissed as a ploy. One of my fellow riflemen put his hand on my shoulder. He didn’t say anything, but you could tell he’d been here before. There was pressure in the fingers. The skin on my shoulder said to keep your knees loose. A flexible limb stays strong in the middle of the quake.

We lined up. Ned looked formless. More like a spirit or primal being than anything, maybe a satyr in reverse. Percy would’ve called it intentional. He would have said something about mechanisms you have to learn to release. I tried to filter out his voice in my head, and when the order came, I squeezed the trigger. The noise was muffled and echoing all at once. You could see the bloodstain begin to grow on Ned’s chest, spreading on his beige GI’s. I told Percy it looked like the Andromeda Galaxy. What I really thought was that it looked like wool.

+

They don’t give awards for being the first woman to participate in execution by firing squad. Mostly, they look at you funny. They think you got rotten fruit inside you, and then someone like Smiley always tells you you probably weren’t even the first girl ever. You just happened to be the first in a very long time. 

I didn’t call Percy that night. The Smith’s was closed, so I had to drive to the WinCo all the way up in Midvale for a chocolate Pepperidge Farm cake and a bottle of cheap white wine. I-15 was deserted. It was well after midnight. I ate the cake while driving, but only the frosting. The frozen chunks felt cool on my tongue. Eventually, I parked at a trailhead and took the wine with me into the mountains. I thought about caves. There are holes in hearts and holes in the ground. I thought, my own death will happen somewhere in that fluorescent town down below, and Percy will be there for it. Percy or some man just about nearly as good. He’ll write about independence in my obituary. There will be raging against societal norms. He’ll say: Serena was gorgeous and violent. She shot what rounds they gave her, and in the West she found her heinous and molten self.

+++

Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction, 48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.