Invitation to an Execution

by Elizabeth J. Wenger

Tsvetoslav Hristov

The kindest thing about my cell is the way the stones, if studied long enough, begin to reveal words, fresh and wise, on their surfaces. They are not written by a human hand but by the rocks themselves; the words come from within the stones and push out like keloid scars, bold bumps along the rough faces. The words must be read from right to left and diagonally since they are not inscribed in any known language.

And so the world must end in the laughter of a mother cow spilling her milk upon the muddy ground. No one may feed while the ground is yet dry. That was the first line I deciphered on the stones of my cell shortly after the guard came and kicked my ribs until the world turned orange and everything stung like citrus poured into a wound.

*

The guard’s name is Gregory. We went to elementary together at a school named after a great general who lost his most important battle. The lesson there: even failed generals will have schools named after them.

Gregory and I met by happenstance, having been assigned lockers side by side. I remember Gregory’s kid-smile, his missing front teeth, how he’d put his hand out and said, “Shake it.” I shook his hand only to draw back when I realized that right in the middle of his palm was a wet loogie.

Even as boys, the bloom of violence was beginning within us. We’d spend our days shooting spit rockets at the girls in class. Ten points for landing in their hair. Fifteen if you could hit them right in the forehead with a wad of wet paper. I always missed. As winner, Gregory would demand I give him something I owned. I had nothing to give but my lunch. I offered it all up: a bologna sandwich, raisin ants on a celery log, rice krispie treats, and nacho chips.

Gregory grew fat on his winnings, and my mother wondered where all these meals she cooked up disappeared to since I remained scrawny no matter how she tried to fatten me. I was no prize swine. And so the seeds of our futures had been sown. Gregory grew strong whilst I nearly disappeared from myself.

*

A revolt is the hen’s way of pecking the farmer’s hand bloody when he reaches for her eggs. The stones are much more articulate than I could ever be. I’m no poet. Amelia, the only girl I ever loved, told me as much when I was first trying to court her. I wrote her lines about her hair “golden as a dragon’s hoard” and her eyes “blue as a robin’s egg.” Dreadful stuff, but then, pining is dreadful.

“Give up writing,” Amelia said.

“That’s like telling me to give up breathing,” I replied.

“You might want to give that up, too,” she laughed. Then she walked away and, some years later, married Gregory. By then, I had solidified my plot and time was dragging me forth in its current though I could not see where the river went.

*

Gregory just told me that the execution has been set for tomorrow at dawn.

“You’re a good man, but you’re a bastard nonetheless,” Gregory said, then spat a fat loogie my way. It landed right between my eyes.

“Fifteen points,” I said. He smiled at me. He is still missing his front teeth. Only these he lost in a fistfight, not to the tooth fairy.

“You bastard, you,” he said, not chidingly.

A bastard I confess I am. In another life, I’d’ve been a fisherman, but it’s the times that make the man, as Pa said. The times made Pa a drunkard, and they swallowed me whole and threw me back up as a madman-rebel. Alas, no Saint is a Saint til he’s dead. And that’s what I’ll be at dawn.

*

The stones declare: A fish is only as safe as the water it swims in.

There was nothing like the lake before sunrise when Pa would drag me out of bed and load up the truck with a cooler and some rods. He’d have the boat on a trailer. I’d look out the back window and watch the boat bump happily along as we drove down the highway towards the ramp.

The water was green like the green you wanted an eel to be. Deep and slippery. Thick green. Impenetrable green. The sun would rise up over it, spitting color and light down on its unperturbed surface. There would be the crack of the beer and the sound of Pa’s rubber boots as he leaned back and set his legs on the edge of the boat. The whole vessel would rock gently. Then I’d cast a line out and wait. Wait and wait and wait. I knew how to be patient. I understood how to draw out time and hold it as it writhed in my hands wanting to slip out and swim onward.

*

The cell is cold in the way it gets cold on a plane. Like the cold isn’t just in the atmosphere but inside you. It starts in your bones. In your marrow. Under every deep, a lower deep opens. That’s what the stones tell me now.

“What time is it anyway?” I yell out, hoping Gregory is still here. My cell has no windows, and so time is not a measurable thing.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Gregory hollers back. I can’t hear any movement. He must be out there by the desk, a ring of keys clipped to his belt loop.

“I would like to know very much,” I yell back.

“Time is a freedom granted to the civilized.” I can tell it’s not his own words but the parroted speech of the people in charge.

“Dignity is a right granted even to the dirtiest pig in the sty,” I yell back. Gregory just laughs but doesn’t tell me how long I’ve got. Soon, he is snoring. I think of Amelia, who must nightly put up with his animal sounds filling their lovers’ den. Does she reach out one delicate hand and pinch his nose? Does she hush him? I do not snore. It is perhaps my only redeeming quality.

Oh, Amelia, the love of my life who did not love me. There is no use asking what she saw in Gregory. Love, like murder, has its own incomprehensible laws.

The square cell is lit by a single, bare bulb that gets so hot it burned my fingertips when I tried to take it out after I first arrived here. I spend most of my time lying right beneath it like a lizard in the sun, hoping that a single beam of white heat will warm my frozen insides.

I used to sleep with a woman whose feet edged up to mine at night and jolted me awake. I’d say, “You’ve got the feet of a corpse!” She’d say, “You’ve got the body of a corpse!”

It was true. I was dead already.

*

The stones sometimes seem to whisper. If they don’t think I’m paying them enough mind, they get upset and begin to spit their words at me. One of them says, Read me, heed me, and I do. I reach a hand up and drag it along the surface and read them like braille. A righteous man falls seven times and gets up. But haven’t I fallen enough?

Gregory, at last, comes around the corner to my cell door and asks me what I would like for breakfast. They will feed me for the last time.

“But you’ll shit it all out as soon as the bullet goes in,” he adds. “I’ve seen it a million times. The body just lets it all out.”

“What would you eat if you were me?”

“I’d ask for a meal so big, it would take a lifetime to eat. And then I’d eat my days away,” Gregory says.

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar.”

“I’m afraid I’m just a guard.” He slaps a hand on his stomach, which has grown large from good feeding. I look into his face and see the face of a cow, chewing cud, the jaw moving side to side, breaking down grass fibers with slow, methodical focus.

“Tell me, Gregory, how did we get here?” I ask him.

“You tried to shoot the Great Leader.” He pauses and strokes his square chin. “And you missed! Ha!”

“Ah, but that’s the easy answer,” I say.

Again, Gregory slaps his stomach. The buttons of his jacket are near to bursting. His head is bald; he could be anyone’s loud uncle.

“What do you want me to say? You went your way, and I went mine.” He chuckles, then chokes a bit on his spit, and the laughter ends in a coughing fit, which itself ends abruptly. The silence seeps in. There is air between us and the metal door of my cell. Yes, I did go my way, didn’t I? And what a way it was. No Amelia in it. No love at all. There was a gun though, a gun placed squarely in my little hand.

If life made me a villain, it made Gregory a boot: a thing of steel and leather, stomping where it would.

“What’ll it be?” Gregory asks again. I almost forgot about the breakfast.

“Eggs, over easy. A bed of hashbrowns. Hot sauce drizzled on top. Two links of pork sausage. A piece of bacon, crispy as it can get. A bowl of raspberries. I love it when the water still crests their pink edges. And half a grapefruit with powdered sugar. Apples and honey. A cup of coffee, black. A cup of orange juice as well. Pulpy is best.”

Gregory rolls his eyes. “You expect me to remember all that?” He turns on his heel and stomps away.

*

It must be early morning now. Almost time. Gregory hasn’t come back since I placed my order and the stones went silent after sending me their last message: For though men be ignorant, yet they are men.

All my life, I have been a hollow dish that the world has poured itself into. I hear the creak of a door opening down the corridor and soon there are men in my cell. Gregory is not among them. My breakfast is not to be seen. My stomach grumbles, then sighs, resigned to its emptiness.

Wordlessly, the men open the door to my cell and pick me up from where I lay beneath the lamp. I bid that cell goodbye. Adieu, I say to the bare bulb. Adieu, I tell the stones who have gone conveniently quiet.

The men march me out and up some stairs. Soon, I am outside. I have forgotten what the sun is, but it reminds me. They take me down a path through a forest of pale paper birch trees. The trees, too, reintroduce themselves. The path is gravel, and I can hear the soft whisper of these tiny rocks, the brethren of my cell’s stones. The pebbles do not speak in any language I can understand, but still I take heart.

Ahead, I can see water spitting itself up on the shore. The men tell me to kneel. My knees go cold when they meet the damp ground. One man tries to put a bag over my head, but I push him off. They acquiesce. There is no reason to look away now. My hands are tied behind my back, and I face the water, hearing the men’s feet recede a few steps behind me. Now the men are loading their guns. And what is a bullet but an alarm clock? They will shoot, and I will awake somewhere else. A new life will spread itself before me, like a woman’s legs opening, opening, opening.

Out in the bay, I see a trout take flight. It arches above the water and leaves a trail of shining droplets dripping from its suspended body. The fish turns to me. Its eyes stay open like they want to take it all in: this wonderful, merciless world of air and light.

---

Elizabeth J. Wenger is a queer writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She is the winner of the Baltimore Review Winter Prize in flash nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. Her essay collection was selected as a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prose Prize. Wenger earned her MFA at Iowa State University’s program for Creative Writing and Environment. Her website is wengerwrites.com