Free Cargo of Orchids by Susan Musgrave

they wound up being a continuing series, and a repetitive series at that, would lose their appeal and be cancelled for poor ratings. When people could turn on their TV sets any night of the week and see daycare centres being blown apart by bombs, or schoolchildren gunning each other down outside the classroom, I didn’t think they’d be too likely to have a continuing interest in the executions of convicted murderers. I was wrong. “Executions Live!” continues to get better ratings than “Larry King Live” or even the Super Bowl.
    Widely reported press conferences are held every day with notorious death-row inmates; every week we see televised images of ambulances bearing away the bodies of executed men and women. The papers flash news photos of mourning friends and relatives outside the prison on the night before the execution, and the local Nazis, or Klansmen, always gets a lot of coverage, with placards saying, “Fry Gay Preverts [
sic
]” and “Gas: A Sure Cure for Black Crime.”
    There may be X number of days left until next Christmas, but when you live under a sentence of death, you never know if there will be a next year. Any one of us could be history by then. That’s not soon enough for Officer Freedman. She’d like us to die laughing in the meantime.
    She
calls it “having a sense of humour”: who but a moron would think “No noose is good noose” a joke? We call it guard humour. Their jokes harass me more than Frenchy’s train, but I’d never let Frenchy know that.
    Another year shot to hell. There’s a
real
joke for you. I can still see my mother standing in Jonesy’s Book and Stationery in East Oyster, trying to find the right greeting card to send her birthday girl on death row.
    I admire my mother—she’s got guts. And a sense of humour. A lot of mothers would have nothing more to do with a daughter who did some of the things people say I’ve done.
    My mother never knew my baby, but she knows how much I loved him, through the letters I’ve written to her since coming to prison. She knows how much he changed me, insofar as one person is capable of being changed.
    Insofar as.
I am starting to sound like Vernal. He sent me a memo for my birthday, and a twenty-dollar bill (Canadian). The memo said he was celebrating fourteen days of sobriety. These weren’t consecutive days, he wrote, but a ballpark figure for the nineties.
    Frenchy’s got her “last meal” order in already. She’s requested steak and onions and pie à la mode. “At least I don’t have to worry about it repeating on me,” she says.
    After questioning Frenchy at some length, I’d discovered that she thought “à la mode” was a flavour, like lemon meringue or cherry. We heard she finished her last meal, leaving a wedge of pie “for later.”

chapter six
    I moved into an unfurnished apartment in the same building as Carmen. Vernal worked late the day I went back to the house to pack up my life, most of which I decided to leave behind. I didn’t want the memories, or the reminders. I took a few cookbooks, some pots and pans, and—I needed something to sleep on—Brutus’s futon. I figured with me out of the house, Brutus would be moving onto our Beauty Rest anyway. Later that week, Vernal phoned to say two of his Time-Life cookbooks were missing. I sent them back to him in a cab.
    In the weeks that followed, I got a series of memos, by courier, signed from Brutus, saying how much he missed me and how he wished I would come home to bake cookies, with the odd P.S. from Vernal saying Brutus’s cognitive therapist was worried about the effect our separation washaving upon him, that dogs from broken homes were more likely to think less highly of themselves than other dogs. The day Vernal fired his secretary and sent me a memo begging me to come with him to Mexico, where we could “relive our honeymoon all over again,” we ended up having another row: I called him and said it was redundant to say “reliving all