Ice Cream Cake

Ice Cream Cake
As the sister of the victim, Lorraine was invited to attend the execution. air max 95She'd waited through eleven years of investigations, trials, and appeals, but when she got the call,air max ltd she declined, choosing instead to stay home and organize her linen closet. cheap nike shoesThe damask napkins, some from her mother and more later from Emily, had been wadded for years together in a drawer. Lorraine spent the day sorting them by size and style, air max shoesthen laundering, starching, pressing, and folding them. basketball shoesShe replaced the napkins in the drawer in neat little stacks.
She read about the execution the next day in the newspaper. max 90At 8:57 p.m. CT, the U.S. Supreme Court denied an application for a stay from Edward Martin Bruer, 37. He was served his final meal at 2 p.m. nike maxHis choices: 8-ounce hickory smoked beef sausage, Cracker Barrel cheese, nike dunk highWendy's double cheeseburger with pickles, onions, lettuce and mayonnaise, replica prada shoesfrench fries and ketchup, a kosher pickle, a Vidalia onion, Coke Classic and Breyer's Viennetta ice cream cake. He said "No" when asked for any last words. He was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 9:21 CT.
She thought at first of making an occassion of the Viennetta, nike dunk lowsetting her table with a china plate, one of the good napkins and a dessert fork from the sterling flatware, flowers, nike dunkslike the ice cream cake party on TV, but tried instead to imagine Edward Martin Bruer's eating of the cake, the last part of his last meal. nike shox nzWhat kind of dishes do they have in prison? nike shox r4She doubted they were like those metal plates she'd seen in old black and white prisoner movies, bar-clangers. Would Bruer, preoccupied, even notice what his cake tasted like and how it was served or would he be hyperfocused, nike shox shoesthinking, I am eating for the last time, this is the last spoon I'll hold in my hand.
Lorraine was certain that Emily would have laughed at first, finding Edward Martin Bruer in her kitchen that night, his doughy, sweaty face lit by the one bulb shining from inside the open refrigerator. retro jordansEmily always laughed at horrible things. The thrill of the real, she called it. Like the purplish slick of dried blood they'd seen on their father's black leather wallet when they'd been called to the police station to claim his belongings after the suicide.cheap handbags Emily held the wallet toward the fluorescent ceiling lights and rocked it in her palm, making the blood shimmer. "Look at that," she said, laughing, "how could it be so pretty?"
Lorraine could picture Emily's eyes, jordan retrointense and engaged, watching every blow to her own chest and abdomen, trying to feel the sound, the swoosh and splat into her flesh, watching her own arms rising then falling away, repulsed. Emily wasn't one to decompensate. Her own murder would not have been lost on her.
The spoon was cold against her teeth as the ice cream slid onto her tongue. Lorraine closed her eyes, swallowed, waited for a picture to form,shox shoes waited for tears, nausea, horror, anything, but Emily's death had, over the years of waiting, begun to make sense to her, become well-worn and ordinary, as if the death had written itself back upon Emily's life, cheap jeansmaking all other endings impossible to contemplate.
Lorraine sliced into the cake by spoonfuls, enjoying its simple, familiar taste, eating until her forehead burned with cold.