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Knot of Thorns

I am so surprised that the other two commenters chose to comment on Karla and her crimes, rather than what Jim Henshaw is expressing in this extraordinary article! My heart cracked and bled with every paragraph of his honest, tormenting, unrelieved anguish over this outrageous miscarriage of justice.

I could spend several paragraphs commenting on how wonderfully written Jim's story is and why I truly agree it deserved center stage on Helium's website today. (I just discovered Helium today and Jim's article's title made me join immediately so I could read the entire work). I could try to relay, to readers of this commentary, how he grabbed my attention immediately with the first two sentences and kept me riveted with increasing stabs of outrage and sympathy, like a double-edged sword, ripping and tearing at my heart until the horrifying parting image. It left me literally feeling ill, sitting there staring at the screen, with my hand over my mouth as if I had been the reporter with him in the court that day. But I won't.

What I want to write down here are some meager words that attempt to convey to Jim how powerfully his words, the imagery they conjured, and the human emotions they expressed, touched me; they touched me deeply, not only as a writer, but as a fellow human being, as one who wants to believe we are more capable of love than of hate, of tenderness rather than torture, of justice not corruption of it. I wish we could find out why Karla still walks among us. But I doubt we ever will. And it leaves me, like Jim, with a knot of thorns around my heart, just like when I stare up into the clouds or at the moon and rail at God for looking the other way.

Learn more about this author, Paula Archer.
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