Procession

Drink orders had been placed. The refreshment attendant was working her way from the back of the crowd to the front, carrying a precariously full tray of precariously full drinks. She smiled sincerely into the eyes of each guest in each row whom she served, like nothing was in danger of spilling, like nothing was in danger. She delivered each beverage as though she were granting an unspoken wish. She moved slowly, serving the crowd with painstaking and uncompromising care.

Over one hundred villagers had congregated to watch the execution, cramped together in a back alley unknown to the district sheriffs. It was one of the first executions organized by the village since the practice had been banned by the district’s new foreign leadership. Despite the threat of fines, jail time, and even disciplinary counter-executions (as the only remaining permitted executions were those performed on accomplices to unlawful executions), the villagers still respected their traditional executions as sources of diversion, tools for social cohesion, and fondly harbored rites.

Tightly arranged rows of wooden stools were positioned in the alley, six stools to a row. A narrow aisle leading to the foot of the scaffold ran down the middle of the rows, separating each row into two sets of three seats. The audience stretched more than thirty rows back. The refreshment attendant’s eyes were large, her skin was smooth, her fingers were long. As each beverage found its drinker, she gently nodded. Her smiling paused only when she looked down at her tray to determine which drink went where next.

The scaffold had been cut in half to help squeeze it into the alley. Even when halved, it only fit between the alley’s walls if set at a slight angle. Despite the awkwardness of this arrangement, the comprehensive village-wide halving of scaffolds was anticipated by the village elders to afford double the production capacity. The village scaffold-mongers had found work again.

Things were getting started. The crowd as a whole was quiet and still, even though almost each individual crowd-member was fidgeting or whispering. A coughing old woman wriggled in her seat to get comfortable, inadvertently rubbing her rump into the arm of a young man who pretended not to be disgusted. A sinewy blacksmith frantically bounced his skeleton legs up and down. Noses sniffed, teeth chattered, lips slurped at what wine had already been served. The crowd as a whole was quiet, the whole alley was still. 

Two small sisters sat across from each other in the front row, anxiously turning their pigtails into the aisle to see if the procession was processing yet. According to longstanding village tradition, an executioner’s procession consisted of three processors: the executioner in back, preceded by the executioner’s assistant in the middle, preceded by the one to be executed, the executionee, in front. This ordering had been experimented with for generations. Placing the executionee in the back of the procession was quickly determined to be a bad idea, for reasons to do with running away. Other reasons for why the executioner’s procession processed in the order and manner it did, along with many other points of decorum and tradition related to execution ritual, had lapsed from practical logistical details into didactic lore and contrived significances, which had lapsed in turn into meaningless parables and garbled, corrupted idioms.

In this case the refreshment attendant had in effect become a part of the procession, for just behind her marched a humongous stomping person, the one to be executed. The executionee was proportioned like a child and had an unformed child’s face, but otherwise grown far past maturity, large and round, jiggling squishy sandbag boobies. He impatiently crowded the attendant, apparently eager, desperate, to get past her and up to the scaffold. The narrow aisle was hardly wide enough for him by himself, much less for him, her, and her swaying still-precarious tray. Towering over her head from behind, his pink blubbery face was soaked in tears, but he was not crying. his tears had dried and his eyes were bloodshot, as though he had just finished crying at length and now was embarrassed to be seen in such a state. His distraught face and ridiculous attempts to inch by the attendant gave a distinct impression that he was more disturbed by whatever had just happened to him than by what he knew was soon to happen, that he was trying to rush away from something and didn’t care where he was headed or what it meant. The refreshment attendant was unperturbed by his urgency, and proceeded to distribute beverages with severe thoroughness, stepping forward slower than any unconsenting bride.

The executioner’s attendant had gone missing, so behind the executionee came the executioner himself. Even taller than the man-boy executionee, the executioner was dressed in the ceremonial grey robe, complete with the realistic mask of a buck, antlers stretched wide like a beckoning.

Since they were a procession of three, once they arrived at the scaffold the blubbery man-boy, who at that point was second in the procession of three, now served as the executioner’s assistant, in accordance with tradition. He fumbled with the noose and arranged it around the refreshment attendant’s neck, since she had been first in the procession of three. Even as the man-boy positioned the attendant at the edge of the scaffold, off which she was to be kicked by the executioner; even as the rope was hoisted above and the executioner said his only words, ancient words of condemnation directed at the refreshment attendant instead of to the man-boy: the man-boy’s anxiety did not relax. The refreshment attendant maintained her look of calm as her hands were tied behind her back. A slight squint was in her expression, like she was trying to remember something. She silently complied with each step as she was readied to be killed, in accordance with tradition.

The executioner kicked her from the scaffold. 

Since the alley was no more than eight feet wide and the scaffold was angled clockwise at roughly 5 degrees, the noose’s natural resting place was roughly three feet away from the right alley wall, making it almost unavoidable for the attendant not to reach her feet to the wall and kick against it, keeping her skull from dislocating from the rest of her. She eventually came to rest with her straight flexed legs pushing her away from the wall, forcing the back of her neck into the noose, keeping the aperture of her larynx from shutting from the pressure of the rope.

“There’s no rule against it,” said an old woman.

Then came the two-toned sound of a mob of sheriff whistles, bringing the ritual to an abrupt end. 

The mob packed up efficiently, not at all like a mob. The attendant was cut down by the executionee and the scaffold was swiftly taken apart by the scaffold-mongers. The mob ordered itself into a neat triple-file line, each villager carrying their stool and their drink, processing together before the executioner, who now held his deer mask under his arm. The executioner was followed by the refreshment attendant and her cart of beverages, who was followed by the scaffold-mongers, who was followed by the executionee, who at last was followed by the executioner’s assistant, who was no longer missing and came pulling up the rear. In minutes the alley was empty but for scraps of trash.