2.

I want to say sorry, Amy. Sorry for all the mess I made. I didn’t even know I was making one, until it was too late.

It started when a man came to see me one day, sweating like a pig. He was all trussed up in a three-piece suit and cowboy boots that clicked and shone in the dim jail light. I wondered why he wore a suit on a day that felt like Hell had frozen over and moved to South Carolina; his face was beet red, and even walking through the door to the holding room seemed like a strain on his poor heart. He was a big man, in many ways, his girth stretching his suit tight against the buttons, which held bravely under the strain.

But I didn’t say nothing.

He told me he was my friend, probably the only friend I’d have in the state.  I know Amy you are my only friend, but I didn’t see the point in being contradictory. He did have kind eyes, though they looked at me like most people did. Like I was a mad dog. He slammed a big manila folder down on the table, sending dust into the air and catch the light. Beautiful, tiny floating angels, dancing in Hell. He told me to tell him my story, so that when “they” came he’d have some grip on what he was dealing with.

I asked him who they was, and he said the people that put me here. I told him I put myself here, that it weren’t nobody else’s fault, and I was already present. He looked at me kind of funny, but he told me to trust him. He said he was an Attorney at Law, and he was my last option seeing as all the other ones turned down the case. Said my only other option was a confession choked out of me by the hangman’s noose. I would have preferred it that way, but my right to due process bound me. 

My lawyer said he took the difficult cases, but he could only stretch his conscience so far. He needed to know why I did it, if he was going to put up a fight to save me.  I thought I deserved to die, but I don’t think my lawyer knew that.

He reached into his satchel and pulled out a recorder device. He told me that I should just talk and that he might write a note or two, but that I should just keep on going.

I don’t know why—I knew no good could come of it--but I told him. 

That’s when things got messy and went all to Hell. If I hadn’t told that man with kind eyes and a too small suit what I had done and why, I would have been dead by the end of that week, and things wouldn’t have been all drugged up from the Lake of Fire like they were. I think people would’ve moved on; they wouldn’t have changed the way they did. 

But I told him. And that’s when the complications started. The complications that will be gathering outside my window, come dark.

So I better keep writing, if I ‘spect to finish.

“Oh please Lord forgive me,

For all that I have done.

Oh please Lord forgive me,

I killed them one by one.”