still deadly in death
by Kim Farleigh
His black coat reached his chained-up ankles, hands tied behind his back.
“You call this bravery?” he smirked.
Balaclavas hid his executioners’ faces.
“The little bunnies won’t show their snivelling snouts, will they?” he snorted. “Tell me why I’m not surprised.”
His chin lifted when sneering: “surprised.”
Howling winds, like tormented spirits trying to crash into the room, thumped the room’s boarded up windows. Grey concrete engulfed the gallows.
“These retribution winds,” the condemned declared, “are coming to get you all.”
Between killing opponents, he had written poetry.
His chains jingled as they pushed him up black, iron stairs. On the black, iron platform above he proclaimed: “I’ve reached my launching pad into eternity.”
He oozed omniscient solemnity–poetry’s highest state.
A rope, like a melted Dalí clock, teardrop hung on the platform’s black, iron balustrade.
“Blindfold?” he was asked.
“Only wimps cover their faces,” he pronounced. “Use it on yourself.”
The leaf-shaped holes those faces around him had for breathing and sight made the executioners resemble nightmarish beings. The condemned, however, only saw them as “cowardly cogs in a pusillanimous pantomime.”
As the noose went around his neck, he shouted: “God reclaims his messengers!”
His father died before his birth. His mother tried aborting the pregnancy. His stepfather’s fists often woke him up. When his mother abandoned him, he fled to his activist uncle, who, introducing him to politics, thrust him towards power. He shredded political opponents alive on industrial shredders. He ordered mass executions to reduce prison populations. He executed the fighting-age men of a village after surviving an assignation attempt when his motorcade passed through that town. The rest of that town’s people got tortured. His army rained mustard-gas shells on troublesome towns, vomiting, blindness, convulsions, asphyxiation abounding. During a meeting with his ruling elite he invited someone responsible for comments he hadn’t liked to join him outside the room where he shot him. The Americans, stopping him making nuclear weapons, found human skeletons in lion cages in his palace.
“Enjoy hell,” someone shouted.
“I’m leaving the hell this country has become because of face-covering wimps like you who let Uncle Sammie destroy this place,” he replied.
He would have swung an index finger around in an arc of accusation at the watching throng had that finger been free.
“These winds,” he warned, “are prophecies of your impending deaths. Don’t you little bunnies worry about that.”
Camera lights illuminated the officials below. They stood back to avoid the cameras.
“Hiding from cameras, bunnies,” the condemned predicted, “won’t save you when these winds arrive. Ahhhh…..What beautiful shrieking. It’s like Mendelssohn.”
A thump, like an exploding artillery round, cracked against the window’s boards.
The officials didn’t want to be seen backing this execution; but it had to be confirmed by influential figures to convince the sceptical of the tyrant’s departure. People still feared him returning, reliable witnesses required to confirm his death. For many, he was the eternal incarnation of universal evil.
“God,” he prophesised, “gives his messengers eternal protection. Long live the nation. Death to America’s dogs!”
“God hates your guts!” someone else yelled.
The officials’ religious group differed from the condemned’s.
“Please!” someone said. “A condemned man deserves respect.”
That man knew his voice would appear on the recording of the execution.
“Fear not,” the condemned responded, “for God’s messengers scorn the pettiness of shivering bunnies soon to die.”
Prophecy infers avoiding annihilation. The man who had asked for respect admired the tyrant’s attempt to defeat non-existence, this last possibility for maintaining hope clutched, with proud vehemence, by he who had revolutionised amoral survival.
“God,” that revolutioniser declared, “decides his messengers’ fates; not face-covering bunnies soon to be annihilated.”
Changing circumstances meant the tyrant changing identity, personality modifications made shamelessly. He didn’t care what he was; he could be a merciless dictator, a prophet, a humanitarian, an international diplomat, a strongman, a devout believer, re-inventions done to avoid eternal powerlessness, extracting the maximum from circumstances, authenticity irrelevant unless profitable.
“Enjoy eternal purgatory,” someone screamed.
Hate turned that man’s eyes into brown blazes of fury.
“I’m leaving the purgatory you wimps have created,” the condemned proclaimed, “to fulfil my eternal destiny.”
His sudden “divine significance” magnified his “authenticity,” continually playing on others’ hopes and fears, extracting all weapons from his cache of guiltlessness. He had dressed as a Kurd when visiting Kurdistan. As an Islamic cleric when visiting mosques. As a traditional Arab peasant when visiting villages. In a suit as a “Western” leader when greeting Western leaders, genuineness irrelevant for it restricted action.
His neck cracked, like a snapping trunk, as he fell. Groans reverberated off the room’s concrete walls because of that snapping. That enigma of expedient identity changes, untroubled by self-perception, had departed. His eyes’ emptiness gave no hint of his destiny.
He had mocked his enemies’ mocking of his capabilities by building monuments to himself; they had paid a high price for having assumed he was just a thug. Their arrogance had returned to haunt in the shape of a revenging demon with an extraordinary mind, their ignorance having caused untold deaths.
That demon’s final comment, hissed out like a perturbing oracle, exploiting his gift for uneasiness, was: “I will be avenged by the millions your cowardice has outraged. Where were you little bunnies hiding before the Americans came? In your little warrens, waiting for Uncle Sammie, shivering like the little bunnies you are, frightened, like now, to expose your twitching snouts. My followers will get one of you little rabbits and torture you to extract the information necessary to get you all. And it won’t matter where you are–bunnies. Welcome to agonising death at the hands of those who detest every puny molecule of your pathetic existences.”
The officials looked silently in different directions as the demon swayed like a pendulum marking time, wind-artillery whining outside like crazed beasts set to kill.
An executioner lifted up the deceased’s head after they had laid the deceased down. The noose had ripped open the neck, leaving a red gash, like a ribbon of death.
The executioner removed his balaclava. He handed his mobile to someone who used it to video the executioner with the corpse.
“Are you crazy?” the official who had demanded respect asked.
“Who’s going to believe he’s dead?” the executioner replied. “You think they’re going to believe you? Or the Americans?”
The official recording wouldn’t show the drop. Revealing that would have enflamed the highly inflammable.
“Who cares what they think?” the official retorted. “You just want a trophy to have something to brag about. I bet you sell the video. You’re going to get us all killed!”
The executioner said: “He was right. You’re little bunnies.”
The dead tyrant remained deadly.
“Give us the phone,” the official said. “Don’t be such an idiot.”
The executioner said: “NO!” A TV network bought the video for a fortune. It went viral. Car bombs killed many of the officials’ sect. The executioner disappeared after the police arrested him. Rumours abounded. Maybe he paid his guards to escape? Blurry photographs of someone resembling him appeared on TV. Others claimed he was a bargaining chip in negotiations for power sharing. Some purported he had been given to the tyrant’s followers to stop the car bombings because those bombings suddenly stopped.
When opposition groups got included in the government, a mystic claimed that the tyrant’s rising soul had transformed the country’s political landscape. Nobody publicly refuted this. The tyrant’s capacity to create supernaturalism meant people avoided criticising him. Evil and good create omniscience amid extreme uncertainty.
The executioner’s tortured body finished in a garbage dump in the tyrant’s hometown as the country drifted towards peace.
Photo of Kim Farleigh
BIO: Kim Farleigh has worked for NGO's in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine and Macedonia. He takes risks to get the experience necessary for writing. He also likes painting, art, bullfighting, photography and architecture, which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. He has received 235 acceptances from over 100 different literary magazines.