La Guillotine
There was a single window to the cell through which I watched the sun and the moon rise in rotation five times, guided between the iron bars. I spent most of my time watching those yellow and white balls slung skyward in their cosmic juggle. The sky burns lilac and amber with blazing yellow, and it wanes lavender and amethyst with gleaming white. It’s not that I’d never paid any attention before. Dead men, I’ve learned, cannot help but to pay special attention to the heavens.
There was a sooty man among others with whom I’d been forced to share my cell. I can barely remember his face now, though he was there before I arrived and he was there when I left. All I can picture is his godawful grin. How could a mouth be at once so toothy and so hideously barren? It was not the rotting remnants of tooth or the pulpy gums that made the grin so wretched. It was what he’d said that made him grin at all.
“I am tol’,” he said on the third day of my captivity, “that the eyes still move, the foreheads still knit, and, most terrific, the lips twitch and tremor like they’s tryna speak.”
“Told by whom?”
“Heard from everyone was close enough t’ see.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you? You, who could not keep your sausage-fingers to your own lying pockets? Don’t speak to me again.” He was a wretched man, the type that ought to be in jail. Not like me.
There was a splintering bench across from mine upon which he stayed slumped like a worn sack of bale, running his blackened hand over the iron bars of the cell. He struck his grimy nails against the metal so that, among the snorting and hacking and spitting from the neighboring cells and the rolling roar from the mob that crowded the courtyard outside, the sound of his tedious clinking would bounce off the stone walls and into my contemptible ears.
“Better a t’ief than a turncoat,” his absent reply, and he continued to worry the rusted iron.
I was no turncoat. I had always been an honorable politician of the people, wrongly accused of conspiracy. I had no business being in that cell to begin with.
It nagged at me, nevertheless, what that sooty imbecile had said, and I couldn’t put it from my mind. I recalled an old friend of mine who had been a respectable physician in Lyons before the revolution. He once told me something of corpses: that he’d seen thumbs that jerk, toes that flutter, lungs that exhale hours after the soul abandoned the body. It was the final grip of life relieving itself of its rotting host, my physician friend explained to me. I had not asked him whether or not a severed head might maintain some semblance of consciousness or awareness. Might it still try to speak? All reason — and I am a reasonable man — suggested otherwise.
I waited five days in that cell before I was taken out. By the third day I had exhausted all of the emotions a dead man can have. It was with a steady mind, then, that I turned my eyes to the juggle of heavenly amber and amethyst. Through that very same window came the grind of the blade, rising and falling in the courtyard below; an unceasing juggle of steel and wood, and flesh. Hungry people came to watch. In cycles did I hear them, roaring, and then quieting. The dreadful silence — the long yawn of that wretched mouth before its fatal bite. A victim is prepared. Hungry humans — quiet; eager. The blade is released. It comes down with that sound of a toy ball rolled across a plank of wood. This, the last that I hear before the crowd surges, and shouts, and gnashes their own chattering teeth.
I know there ought to be another sound that would reach my ear, were I near enough to hear it — a sort of dull sound, as blade cleaves wood; a miserable clunk as tooth meets mandible; the same sound that hatchets make as they’re buried into the chopping block. This sound I hear, but only as a phantasm. My mind — my wretched mind — produces it for me. More than the certainty of my impending death, my continuous search for that somber thud nearly drove me to madness. Always, the surging crowd roared before the sound might’ve reached me.
It was in the scarlet morning of the fifth day that the ragged gaoler stopped outside my cell. It would be the last time I’d have to hear his wretched shuffling. Incidentally, it would be the last time I would hear anyone speak my name.
“Marchand, Allard, Bissett, Dupont, et Cobb; allons-y. Let’s go.”
Waiting in that cell, listening to the grinding and the roaring, and straining to hear that fatal thud — these only made me further long for my soul’s release. I placed myself at the front of our line of five. I intended to be the first one beheaded so that I would no longer have to suffer in anticipation.
We were prodded by rusting knives into an unsteady tumbrel which would take us to the steel and wood. The hungry crowd paid little mind to the cart of newcomers, except for an eager few who hurled rotten food and mud upon us. The rest were far too enchanted with the looming scaffold in the center of the courtyard, raised for the spectators at the reaches of the heaving mass.
A man was bent at the foot of the scaffold when our cart was halted, his head latched in the lunette, his black hands balled in fists, tremoring, tied at the small of his back. We were seized and stood up behind him. Despite my best efforts, I was placed second in line. I did not know the man before me except as a huddled shadow from the corner of the cell. He was all I could stand to look at in the midst of the shouting sea, and I noticed every detail of him as he made feverish glances over the thirsty crowd. His cheeks were covered with dark stubble, his nose came to a hook at the tip. His eyes were dark and sad. They turned down at the outside edges. His cheekbones were high. He must have been a dashing man before. I glanced over my shoulder only once at the man behind me. He was a beady-eyed man who hadn’t stopped weeping since yesterday afternoon.
Again, the roar and quiet of the enthralled crowd, like a furious orchestra conducted by the angled blade. Even there, at the foot of the beast, I found my ear searching for that dull thud — still nothing. The blade dropped, the black fists loosened. There was a filthy boy whose duty it was to push the sagging bodies off the scaffold into an adjacent cart with other sagging bodies, all to be hauled to some trough and reunited with the dirt. I could not see what was on the other side of the looming guillotine, but this side was stained all brown and maroon. Even the great blade; brown and maroon.
The man before me was dragged onto the platform and kicked in the crook of the knee. The executioners with their black hoods were large men — larger than he and larger than I — and they tossed the man wherever they liked. He was harnessed into the machine and the lever was pulled. The stained blade fell, grinding against the wooden beams. Fingers relaxed and heels turned to the sides. Red cascades spattered upon the scaffold and dripped slowly down the woodwork. The filthy boy was again summoned. Through the open lunette appeared the gnashing humans.
An arm’s length from the guillotine and I still could not hear the thump of the blade.
My toes became icy and my hands clammy. My heart, to my surprise, did not rush.
I was grabbed at the shoulder and kicked in the crook of my knee, and I fell. One of the butchers turned a crank to lift the blade. Over the block I went, forced into the half-moon, lunette slammed at the base of my skull. It was slimy, and warm. Then did I witness the horror on the other side of the guillotine.
A wicker basket, stained brown and maroon. Pale, semi-alarmed faces looking east, and west, and north, and south, and to the heavens and the earth. Mouths open, aghast. There, on the top of the brimming basket, I saw that man, with his dark stubble, and his high cheekbones, his hooking nose, and his oozing neck. I could not take my eyes from him. The machine pressed against my throat, and I could not draw a full breath. The shallow breathing at last sped my doomed heart.
The blade, reaching its height in the scaffold, shuddered the great machine. Quiet from the crowd. They ogled my helpless body — I know they did, because they ogled all of our helpless bodies. Everything slowed in those moments. I was in that lunette longer — far longer, it seemed — than the stubble-faced man before me.
Even if I had tried, I would have been unable to take my eyes off him, the man in that wicker basket. There was still something there — a twitch. It was more than the mechanical shiver of dead flesh; more than a quivering toe or a bending thumb. His sad eyes were still moving. His head was sideways to me. His eyes turned, up toward his forehead, and downward, and they blinked. They turned towards me, and we locked eyes. He could see me from that basket — I knew that he did. His eyes became fearful and wild. Another twitch, lower on the face. His lips quivered, and trembled, and strained, tried to part, to perform that duty they’d ever known. Another twitch at the corner of the mouth, and the eyes straightened, and the lids slackened. He was gone.
There was grinding, and it swooped down upon me. The people screamed, and hollered. In that moment, with my ears next to the mandible, I could at last hear the grisly thud, and then I was the one who fell.
The world made a whipping turn. A short distance did I tumble, and then all was still. The shuffling of feet on the scaffold, and another thud into the cart adjacent. I could not suck air, for there was nothing with which to suck.
I could still feel. Not my icy toes or my clammy hands — those were gone. But my nose, and my cheeks, and my skull. Something stiff pressed against my cheek — it was his stubble — and into the back of my head pressed the rubbery flesh of a frigid nose.
I shifted my eyes downward, where there was only darkness. Forwards, the rim of the wicker basket, and beyond that, the quieting crowd. They were looking above me, and there did I turn my eyes. Another pair of small, weeping eyes watched me from the lunette. I caught their attention. I knew that he saw me. A tear fell from his eye onto my cheekbone. I tried to speak, to shout, but there was nothing with which to speak. My parched lips quivered, and did not part, and I resigned myself.
This all has come rushing to my memory, here, in this state of mine. The sooty man was true all along. The eyes, the forehead, the tremoring lips…
Darkness has begun to descend, a great shadow over the mass of people.
There is a glimmer of bright light that descends. There is shouting. I am going now. The weeping eyes are coming. He tumbles onto me and his skull cracks against mine, the same as I’d felt often as a frolicking boy. And then he tumbles further, out of and away from the basket — mine was the content that set it full. He rolls on the platform in front of me, comes to a stop on his cheek, facing my way, and we lock eyes again. He blinks.
I am going now.
His eyes shift. His lips quiver. His forehead knits.
Another head peers at me from above, a shadow against the cornflower sky.
This, the last I see.
