E.

You're adorable in
sheets of green,
darkly draped lightly.

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A Hanged Man

Leaning against the bank's wooden colonnade, I took several long drags from one of the rolled cigarettes I kept in my shirt pocket. The air was moist after the long showers which had fell during the night. It had rained for a good four hours before dawn, waking the town from its indolent routine. A hanging was to take place; a spectacle for all ages. The children made masks in effigy of the condemned man, but they were too generic to resemble the person for whom they were intended. The man, I'm told, committed horse theft; typical, but I guess the judge wanted to make an example. In these parts, horses were good for two things--breeding and selling. If you couldn't do either of them, you had to steal.

I'd reckon him to be royalty, if not for the circumstances; the aire he cast about muted the crowd and etiolated their skin. I was too far away to see his face, but the man appeared as a debutant performing before the pallid and mute crowd. I don't know who this man is, but in earnest I cared for his fate. What if he were a good man with a harmless disposition for theft? David was a murderous adulterer, yet he was so loved and favored. What if, for all the sin in him, a redemption commanded still a moral graceness, like Moses at Mizraim.

I departed the colonnade, walked over to the gallows, stepped up onto the platform, pulled out my gun, and shot the executioner. He fell into the crowd, juxtaposing a feverish red to the pale-stricken crowd. They say that red is the color of revolution. For the first time, I looked at him. He had been gruffed up a bit by the jailer, sporting bruises of a variety of shapes and sizes. A grizzled beard contributed to his guilty appearence, and resembled that of a ruffian visiting port after a few months at sea. "Who are you," he asked with a contemptuous tone. I didn't answer. He asked again. I was wrong; this man is nothing but a common vagabond, not some Christ to save me from the fucking indolence of this town...so, I shot him in the face. Slumping to the platform, the smell of pathetic mortality filled my nostrils. I announced to the children, "Remove your masks; for he is not worth your worship or fear."

Enraged with nihilism, I fired off four more shots into the man, but then I stopped. One of the children approached and gave me a pendant. There were neither demarkations of signfigance, nor vestiges of engraving on the trinket; so, then, why had it been given to me? The child spoke, "Worship this and keep it close in mind. This is your mind now." To which, I raised my gun to my temple and fired.