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2000), I thought of putting up a sign: Death Row. Population 3, and Still Shrinking.
    My mother’s card was shaped like a wedge of Swiss cheese. “Happy Birthday,” it read. “Another year shot to hell.” We got such a kick out of it that Rainy and I decided to make our own line of death-row greeting cards, available in time for Christmas next year, by mail order.
    Rainy was responsible for the graphics. For her first effort, she drew a bunch of turkeys getting decapitated by anaxe-wielding Santa. When you opened the card there was Santa Claus, strapped in the electric chair. I had to think up a message. I penned, “Hope you get a charge out of this.”
    She drew another picture, same theme—only this time it was Jesus in the hot seat, trying to blow out a life’s worth of time on the birthday cake in his lap. I wrote, “More power to you.”
    Then Rainy went a bit too far, I thought, and drew Mrs. Claus being ambushed by a firing-squad disguised as a party of carollers. I wrote
The Executioner’s Carol
across the cover of the book Mrs. Claus died reading.
    But what kept me awake at night was trying to think of words to go with Rainy’s depiction of lethal injection. She drew Santa lying on the gurney while the guards tried to find a vein for the IV drip. Rainy says the hospital gurney they strap you to is shaped like the gingerbread-man cookie cutter her mother used to use. Her mother made gingerbread men every Christmas, and she let Rainy decorate them. Rainy gave them eyes and noses, and before she was old enough to spell her own name, she began giving them erections. Her mother wanted to know where she was getting her “ideas.” From her father, Rainy said.
    I wrote, “Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”
    Rainy didn’t make the connection. She says I have to think the way someone buying a card would think—whatever that means.
    This was one business venture doomed from the start.
    ——
    When it comes to choosing the form of capital punishment that best suits your personality, there’s no book in the library to consult. So I devised a guide for those who can’t make up their minds, or people with multiple or nonexistent personalities. I wrote it after I heard a psychologist being interviewed about the idea that we all have a personality. He said most of what people think of as their “own personalities” are “absurdist idiosyncrasies” at cross-purposes with their lives and happiness.
    In my
Guide to Capital Endings
, the personality description would come first, followed by an appropriate Final Solution:
    1) You’re very committed—to work, friends and relationships; when the going gets tough you’re
always
there: hanging.
    2) You’re aggressive, crave adventure, live for the moment: electric chair.
    3) You’re a little unsure of yourself, never quite certain what you’re looking for: lethal injection.
    4) You’ve got a big heart, love everything on earth that lives and breathes: gas chamber.
    5) You’re nurturing, impulsive, a little preachy, but get a bang out of everything: firing-squad.
    Methods of torture and killing people have evolved, like everything else, to keep abreast of the times. (I’ve left out other antiquated methods of capital punishment—the guillotine, beheading with an axe, gibbeting, breaking at the wheel, stoning, pressing, drawing and quartering, crucifixion.) For instance, one modern form of torture used by guerrilla terrorists in repressive Third World regimes is to force a starving rat into a woman’s vagina, then to stitch up her labia so the rat will have to gnaw his way out through her stomach if he wants fresh air. In one case I read about, the woman happened to be pregnant. They waited until she went into labour before proceeding with the questioning.
    All these methods were devised (surprise! says Rainy) by men. Rainy’s let a childhood of being sodomized, an adolescence of being forced to have sex with dogs