She lay in her bed which was shaped like a little race car.  The orange tinged streetlight outside cut into the dark, and her room was a comfortable twilight.  The bars over the window protected her house from the world of central Los Angeles when she and her mother were not home.  They cast a regular shadow across her as the night dragged on.  Her aunt Tessie was in the living room, the flickering light of the television visible under the door.  Her mother was in Texas.

Her father was gone.  She thought of him often, un-forgetting his death, examining her heart, ensuring she didn’t forget him.  Next to her in bed was her dog, Rufus, and her box.  She had marbles in a wooden box, a box lined with red velvet.  Each marble was a year of her life that her father had been with her.  There were six marbles.  There should have been eight.  Each one was different in color and size.

Her favorite marble was the blue one with silver sparkles in it, frozen in suspension as if caught by the moonlight and trapped forever in a perfect sphere of blue glass.  She would hold it up to her right eye and squint through it at the streetlight outside, which would become blurry and indistinct in a sea of silver confetti.  She would stare at the world through that tiny universe until the sounds of south Los Angeles dropped away, muffled by the blood rush of her imagination.

That somewhere in a holding cell on this night the man who'd killed her father was waiting for midnight with sweaty desperation and loneliness harder and harsher than anything her frame could support even if she could imagine it.  Her tiny fingertips with the nails chewed lazily twirling the marble held over her eye as the man waited, trapped in that cell, his last minutes ticking.

It was almost midnight in Texas.  Almost time, she heard her Aunt’s muffled voice.

"Ed," the light was bright and antiseptic.  The chamber was stainless steel and white, clean and 1950's medical.  "Do you have any last words, Ed?" the voice mechanical but familiar.

Do you have anything important enough to say?  Do you have the ability to conceive your last thoughts?  Ed?  There is a deadline, you know.  Yeah, he thought.  Let me the hell up and outta’ here, he thought.  Let me go, I’ll find my own way down the road, he thought.  Let me go back to my cell, let me slip by.

"Mister Hulver?  Do you have any last words?" the man's voice crackled from a speaker in the wall.  Strapped to the table, Ed stared at the ceiling expecting to see a smudge or a hole marking the spot where hundreds of souls had passed.  The lack of any such sign left him curious as to the condition of the floor.  He shook in the restraints, terrified by what was to come.

"Yeah," he croaked, his throat dry and constricted.  He'd assumed that inevitability would relax the fear, that he would achieve some sort of inner peace, but his fear was now bigger than him.  Bigger and nastier, bigger than the prison.  His mind screamed the stories he’d heard in the yard and on death row about the last minute.  He wanted it gone so bad, wanted so bad to just not be here.  "Yeah, I do.  I wanted to say I'm real sorry, Jody.  Real, real sorry.  I didn't mean to hurt you, but my mind wasn't so good, and my soul was unsaved.  I'm real sorry," and he started to cry, a chuffing choked moan that made the witnesses shudder.  Some of them, it silently broke their heart.  Some of them, it added a layer to the numb that surrounded them already.

The headlines the next day read "Edward Thomas Hulver, convicted serial killer, famed for his exclusive murders of small people, executed in Texas."  Jody finally sleeps when she hears her Aunt's crying stop.  The outside world is muted orange.  Her hand relaxes and the marble hits the floor, rolling to a stop next to her shoes.

Nothing is fixed, nowhere.