Written by Rik Villanueva

I’m not scared of dying. . . anymore. I am the reason for so many things, so many changes, that I will live forever. I am already immortal. What happens after this doesn’t really matter anymore. Who I am, you already know. Television had my face flashing all over world. Children in third world countries know my smile. They will grow up to tell their own children that if they’re not good, it’ll be me that comes to get them at night. My name won’t have to be translated for people to know who it is you’re talking about. My given name, my Christian name, will be forgotten. I will be the last face that people see in the darkness as they shiver under a down blanket in the summer. My laugh will keep people from entering a room without reaching in to turn on the light first. I made the church sit up and listen.

Where I am, light hits the floor in columns. Grown men cry at night for their mothers as they sleep. Where I am, the man in the next cell wears too much make-up and has government issued dentures that flash almost colorless in the dark as he takes them out to service a guard. That guard will close his eyes as that number glides back and forth on him and replace him with every high school fantasy or porno or unlucky female driver he stopped when he himself was still on the streets. Behind his closed eyes, red and blue flash like strobes in a strip club. He doesn’t care that it’s a man on his knees in front of him. All he knows is that it’s the best head he’s ever gotten and, in here, it’s not illegal if nobody sees it.

The difference between that guard and me, one day he’ll have to answer for his sins. I won’t.

That guard keeps me up at night. Not out of fear. He tends to be a bit. . . vocal. Deep down, I know he’s trying not to make a sound. But his effort to keep quiet forces more noise. Even though it’s after lights out, there is still just enough light to make out shapes.

Through this cage wall, I’ll stick out my hand with a mirror in it and see this guard standing with his chest pressed to the bars. Sweat beading on his brow, glistening against the bit of moonlight trickling in through the barred window within. He’s a heretic and a sinner and, in his afterlife, he won’t have that cross around his neck to clutch at. His God will take it away from him. For all eternity, he will complain how it isn’t fair. He should feel lucky he’ll even have an afterlife.

I won’t.

How long I’ve been here is irrelevant. Every day and every night is exactly the same to me. Outside in the natural light of the sun, hundreds of people line up holding signs calling for my execution. Signs and banners that read like poetry if you line them all up:

Let him burn/The eyes of God weep for your soul/

There is no mercy worthy of your sins/The end is

nigh/Your end is nigh/Redemption Now!!!

Not good poetry, but poetry nonetheless.

The people-protesters, believers, judges, all of them. All will be judged, not me. These people stand behind their Bibles and Christmas carols and an idol made of two sticks cursing me while their own sins get swept under some divine carpet.

I know these faces.

The man standing on the hood of his car, when he was seventeen, he and his teammates pulled a train on some drunk cheerleader after a homecoming game. She bled on them as they stabbed away her innocence.

The woman wearing the WWJD t-shirt is thirty-two years old. She videotaped her neighbor having sex. That isn’t a sin. Selling that tape to some on-line trader and ruining the lives of two people seems a little hypocritical now.

Who would Jesus videotape?

She made a fortune off that tape. Her neighbor was a tele-evangelist that used to tour the whole of North America with his family, a wife and twin daughters. His partner on the tape was not his wife. His partner on the tape was a friend of his teenage girls.

Sodomy on tape fetches more money if the catcher looks underage.

The sin that sin produced.

That videotape is paying for her time off from work at Planned Parenthood to be here right now.

There’s two families that came together. Their RV sits like a retarded senior after a shot of morphine. There are six of them: four adults and two kids.

These kids, their parents are yelling Bible passages at me about repentance and salvation. These kids are out behind the RV looking for frogs or baby birds to strap fireworks to. The frog that goes the highest or rips into the most pieces wins.

Is that freedom? Or free will?

If God is all-knowing, all-seeing, knows the beginning and the end at the same time, does free will cease to exist?

If our path is predetermined, do we really have a choice?

Does one choose to sin or is he destined to?

I’ve already made up my mind and God knew about it a long, long time ago.

They don’t let me out in the yard if there’s a lot of people gathered out there. And with my execution just days away, it looks like I’ll never feel the sun again.

Every time someone was executed for their crimes before me, there would be a group of anti-death penalty demonstrators gathered. They’re not here. All the faces out there, they’re all angry.

The sin that sin produced.

They all want me dead. They all want to see my body writhe and twitch as thousands of volts of electricity run through my veins. They want to see my eyes bleed and bulge out of my head without a blindfold when the switch is thrown. They want my body to be wrapped in barbed wire, to have that barbed wire tied to rope tied to the tails of four horses facing different directions. Four executioners would slap those horses and let them rip me apart if the people had their way. These people don’t really want to see me dead, they want to see me die.

Everyday for the last couple of weeks, the crowds have gotten bigger and bigger. I always end up seeing distant faces of fellow sinners. Sad we won’t meet after midnight Thursday.

One of those faces I see looks very familiar. It’s the face that put me here. None of it was my fault. I can’t really blame her now that she’s dead. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant, none of this would have happened. She was bored with the life she chose or was chosen for her. She couldn’t stand being sheltered behind the black and white walls of her habit. She hated being told what to do by women who never really experienced life. She ran away. She found me. She cheated on God. How was I supposed to know she was a nun?

Because of her, the church changed its views on abortion. She didn’t tell them what really happened. She cried rape after she missed her period. She said that a monster had forced himself on her and made her accept his seed so that Satan could take his place among the living.

The sin that sin produced.

By the time her story made the news, I was hundreds of miles away playing voyeur to the sins of the heartland. My picture was all over the country. I became synonymous with evil.

Who could do such a thing?

Who knew that kind of evil existed?

Who would Jesus videotape?

Even when the tape she and I made was played in the courtroom, nothing changed.

By that time, she and her son were dead.

The lawyers for the “good guys” painted a gruesome picture of what I had done:

The defendant stalked. . . no, hunted the victim for months trying to find

her whereabouts. When he found her and after she pleaded for her life, he

stabbed her with this knife over sixty times in the face, neck, and chest.

But he wasn’t done yet. He took the very same knife and proceeded to

cut from her womb the eight month old fetus. His son. Detectives only

found a leg of the child next to the body of his mother.

Who I am is evil. Where I am is hell. Tomorrow won’t be like today or yesterday. Tomorrow I won’t be here. Tomorrow I won’t be. . . period.

I’ve been here for thirteen years watching the guards and numbers fondle each other. For thirteen years, I’ve heard Bible quotes and bad advice from free sinners. Thirteen years ago, I stopped believing in God. Most death row inmates go the other way. Abandoning God was redemption.

I’m not afraid of dying anymore. What happens after this won’t really matter anyway. Without God, there is no afterlife. I simply won’t be.

I’ve thought about it for thirteen years, amid crying men hellbent on salvation. . . sex with nuns is only illegal in the eyes of God.

That’s why I became an atheist in prison.

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