A Short Walk to the Blade

It was early, maybe 6 am when they took me from my holding place and marched me through town.  The morning blue skies hung heavy above the muddy streets and mobs that wished to watch me die.  Some of them booed and threw rocks and vegetables at me while others cheered my name, still throwing rocks.  My face had become a scruffy mess in the past weeks and itched horribly but my shackles prevented me from scratching it.

As we turned a corner, my wife’s mother leapt from a doorway wielding a large, wooden bucket.  I ducked my head in preparation for the worst, a bucket of boiling water or tar maybe, but instead felt the sick, warm splash of excrement on the back of my head.  A guard shoved her out of the way, laughing in amusement, while another carelessly wiped my head with an already soiled rag.  I could hear her shrill, banshee voice sailing off behind me, “Put him on the wheel!”  The stench in my beard was unbearable.

A light shimmered in the distance above the crowd, blinking with my steps and calling to me, “Come closer!  Let me lead you,” and as we got closer I realized that it was the shining blade of the guillotine.  It knew I was coming and couldn’t wait.  It wanted me.  It inched its way towards me through motion of my feet.  “I want to eat you!”  I could see it drooling all over the crowd and with each step it grew, grew, grew until it became a towering monolith of death.

There it loomed before me: the great, excited guillotine, feared by all for it’s wrath!  I wasn’t afraid.  The enlightened device was assured to offer a swift and painless death (though some pain is known to be enticing.)  I recall an execution I had attended where the criminal’s head was to be removed by axe.  After several strikes to the neck, the executioner gave up on his dull blade and finished the job with a large dagger.  The beheaded man gargled horribly the entire time.  Things would be much quicker for me, one swift chop to take me out of the world.  My wife would be there.  My mistress would be there.  My head…  It made me feel as though my death would be strangely romantic.  One for the poets.

“Passion is, for lust, the head

So Cupid raises axe

And selling me a lover’s heart

Keeps skull for lovers’ tax”

When we arrived at the front of the crowd I quickly scanned for familiar faces.  Bartender, doctor, philosopher.  Groups of friends who enjoyed my work, collegues of sorts.  In front of the mob was my mistress, Karlotta,  gloomy and alone.  God’s light shone on her from the Heavens so brightly that for a moment the crowd disappeared, leaving us alone in the muddy square.  She looked down at her feet and then back up, shyly, oozing guilty presence.  “It’s not your fault,” I told her with eyes, guessing she understood.  She peeked a modest corner smile at me.  The last smile I’d ever see, one of those gorgeous sad girl faces.  I closed my eyes to solidify her face in my brain.

Eyes, lips, cheekbones and tears.

Neck…

I opened my eyes and noticed my wife, standing tall and cold to the side of the crowd with a canvas wrapped up in her arms.  Her face was strong and serious, the solemn face of a born widow, of a woman bound to remarry.  The face of my misery.  She unrolled the canvas and held up the painting I had done for my mistress.  It was one of my finer works, certainly more beautiful than any of the portraits I had done for her.  She walked across the crowd to where Karlotta stood and dropped the painting in the mud before her.  It was typical of my wife, the philistine, to treat art with such careless disregard.  Karlotta loved all forms of art and now stood in total indignation before my wife.

I wished to watch the awkward confrontation but was pulled from my spot by the guards and led up to “The Final Soapbox,” an old, bloodstained tree stump used as a chopping block by old executioners of the Axe method before our town got it’s mighty blade.  I stood on the stump and looked at my feet.  Between them I could see the deep marks where axe after axe chopped through endless condemned necks and for the first time since my sentencing, my stomach sank.  The Executioner yelled at me.

“Say something so we can get this over with!”

I looked at the spot where my wife and mistress were standing only to find my wife missing and my beautiful, pathetic Karlotta clenching her muddy canvas like an old blanket.  It broke my heart not to know whether or not slaps were exchanged.  The crowd softened their noises to hear me – hungry eyes glued to my throat, all bloodthirsty sheep with fangs.  I had no idea what to say.  Something sweet to my mistress that would attract all kinds of horrid attention towards her?  I took a breath, swallowed and shouted:

“Paint is fucking expensive!”

There was silence as I looked out over the anxious hyena-faces of the crowd towards the tavern I used to visit.  I had painted the sign over the entrance and so was often supplied with a free drink by the owner on nights when he could see I was down.  I would sit at the bar and he’d bring a drink and even light my pipe for me.  Now he, like all the others, stood in the crowd and awaited my death, angry and dumb as the rest of the mob.  Old friends, good in drink but not in death.  The guard, bored by silence pulled me off the stump.  “Paint is expensive,” he said to me, “but blood is cheap.  Yours is very cheap.”

He was right.

The guard took me behind the machine and a Priest blessed my forehead with his wet thumb.  I wondered what the act was like for him.  How did it make him feel to bless a dead man in this purely obligatory fashion?  He must have known as well as I that I was being sent straight to hell.  God didn’t need to judge me.  The mob had already done that.  Thus, I was dropped to my knees and my head was placed in the lunette.  I requested not to have that offensive, smelly death bag over my face.  I wanted to see and be seen.  The Artist!

The blessed spot on my forehead felt cool in the wind.  I tried to look up to the crowd but found myself uncomfortable and so I let my head hang, looking into the basket.  The Executioner began pulling the rope that worked the guillotine’s pulley.  Hearing the blade rise behind my ears sent a shudder through my spine like a hundred tiny spiders jumping on my shoulders and running up and down my spine.  It was an enormous rush that caused me to arch my back.  I could feel the distance between my neck and the blade growing, stretching the fiber between life and death.  Time and space were expanding just for me – the gracious gift of suspense that comes with the sound of a large, forty pound blade sliding up against the grain of wood.  But all the tension was shattered by an unrecognizable swoosh of sound that sent my brain in a million confused directions.  The world spun around me.

I couldn’t tell if I felt pain or pleasure or hot or cold.  I couldn’t tell if I felt anything at all.  I couldn’t even tell if I was alive or dead.  Life must still have been stirring in my head.  The sun became incredibly bright for a moment, until I felt a tug in my hair and suddenly I was in the air, flying, but my forehead felt tight and my vision was blurry.  A familiar sob echoed around my presence, searing through the cheers and jeers of the crowd, until, like an epiphany I could tell exactly what direction it was coming from.  The world began to focus as I looked up slowly, straight into the eyes of my mistress who was crying hysterically, but when my eyes met hers she stopped and stared, slack-jawed and red eyed, right back at me in what appeared to be utter, indescribable confusion.  It was the most burdensome face I had ever seen.

So I stopped looking.  There was an eclipse.