Permanent Midnight
I COULD TELL by the look on my lawyer’s face that the news he had for me was not going to be good. My prison cell was small and cramped and stuffy, and I wanted my lawyer to just fess up and tell me what he had come there to tell me.
I was shocked, to say the least. Those protesting hippies had finally gotten their way. Or so they thought. After decades of activists ranting and raving about how inhumane and unconstitutional lethal injection was, the United States Supreme Court had finally heard enough.
The solution? Bring back the guillotine.
I had always been what advertisers would call an “early adopter.” I was the first person in my family to own a smart phone, and I took to the Internet right away in the mid-90s. But this was ridiculous. Despite my own complaints and protests, my execution date was scheduled for August 3, and that was that.
* * *
The big day came before I knew it, and I was nervous, as one might suspect. What surprised me the most was what an ergonomically inappropriate instrument the guillotine is. First, you kneel down on both knees, which is quite rough on your patella tendons. Then, you must bend your neck at a 90° angle and place it through the hole thingamajig directly beneath the sharp, shiny blade. For the finale, your hands are locked into place on opposite sides of your head, leaving your wrists feeling constricted and lifeless, as your elbows dangle aimlessly. Possibly the worst part about the design of the guillotine is that you are forced to stare at the boring floor during your last few moments.
The blade dropped quickly, and I heard its approach. The pinching at the back of my neck was ever so slight, and before I knew it, it was all over. A blackness darker than the center of an empty galaxy surrounded me, and I was adrift in a permanent midnight. There was a heavy silence, too. It was as if no sound had ever existed — as if music had never been invented and birds had never chirped a single note.
But I sensed many things, and I knew that I was still alive. There were gasps and grunts and screams within the execution chamber, and I sensed them all. I stood upright, placing my hands on top of my shoulders. I then slid my hands toward the juicy center of my body, where my neck and head once sat. My hands became suddenly drenched with warm blood, at which point I dried them on the black and white striped prison uniform that covered my chest.
People were running and shoving and pushing each other now, as none of them had never seen a living man walk the earth without a head. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, so I just stood there for a few brief moments. I approached the warden, then clutched the shoulder pads of his suit jacket with my warm, bloody hands. I squeezed firmly, and the warden’s shoulders wiggled beneath the bones of my fingers and danced with the flesh of my palms. I reached inside his breast pocket and removed a cold key ring.
It took me a few minutes to make my way to the exit door of the execution chamber, but I eventually got there. As soon as I made my way into the main prison block, I could feel the warmth and support of my fellow death row inmates, as they must have been half excited and half horrified by what they were witnessing. But I kept on walking, because I was leaving that place behind, and it was leaving me.
Neither the prison staff nor the warden knew what to do with me, so they just let me go. I paced right out the front door of the prison, without so much as a single hand being placed upon my body.
Despite all their bluster and bravado, in the end, the folks at Concrete Penitentiary just didn’t have the stomach to try to take me down twice.
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