The Dying Cycle

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    The body hangs limp in the noose, and the executioner’s apprentice comes out to collect. He carries with him a bowl, a cup and a shiny new knife. They always get a new knife the first time. He doesn’t know if the body is dead yet, he doesn’t know until he puts his hand on the chest and doesn’t feel it move, he checks for signs of breath under the nose. It comes up empty. He’s surprised, his eyes widen, it happened faster than he expected. The body is dead.

    I could have told him that.

    The body is still warm. He avoids touching it as he reaches up for the rope, and when he cuts it, the body falls crudely onto the platform with a thump. The surface is hard, made of wooden planks and when he kneels at the body’s side it presses into his knees. The body is in some sort of slumped over sitting position with splayed limbs. He takes one, an arm and turns to the pale side of the wrist, he takes out his shiny new knife and cuts. The blood drips into the bowl he had placed underneath.

    The people who are watching from the distance come surround us like hungry wolves or slinking cats. In the front of the pack a mother holds her sick child, the apprentice has always had a soft heart, so this is the one he greets first.

    “It’s 5 coins,” he tells her, and smiles. It’s enough to pay for a full day of food.

    “I’ll do it,” she says, "the doctor-” she stutters her words, “-the doctor says it will help him.”

    The money changes hands, then it's stashed into a bag on his hip. He gives her the cup with the blood from the bowl. Pouring into the cup has to be done carefully so that blood from the body doesn’t stop being spilled. Eventually the apprentice will have to change the cut to another place when the blood of the arm dries up.

    She can’t go far; she will need to return the cup after they are done with it, so we watch as she lifts the lip to her child’s mouth and the child groaning and with fluttering eyes takes of the drink.

    The dam brakes open; the rest of the crowd pushes towards us. There is an elderly man who wants a longer life, a lady who wanted to be prettier and a monk who isn’t quite clear on why he wants to drink blood but pays enough so it is given. More and more people come, and more and more people consume me, until the blood runs dry.

    I want to ask them something, I have questions. How is drinking blood of the hanged man, the blood still warm from the body? Does it bring you strength, as it weakens me?

    I am the hanged man. Killed and drained and consumed by the masses. I want to tell the apprentice. I want to laugh at him. I want to tell him this happens to all of us in the end.

    The money pouch is probably the heaviest it’s ever been for the apprentice, and when he’s done, he stashes it on the opposite side of where he hoists the body onto his shoulders. The body weighs him down, so he slumps down on one side.

    It’s time to go to the butcher, I’ve seen this happen before, I know what’s happening. The streets are dirty. The people are abhorrent. They avoid us, we don’t worry about pickpockets or getting run into. Though these are things I never worry about, it’s not part of my normal worldly concerns.

    The apprentice when he started, used to worry, used to pinch the fabric of his master’s clothes as they walked as if he was scared of getting lost, as if he felt the stares. I wonder what he thinks about this, feeling rejected by society. I wonder if he ever felt he could have been anything other than a legalized murderer. Perhaps he once dreamed of being liked. Ha.

    The butchery is a nice building on a poor street; there are cheap lodgings and brothels and brothels that also have cheap lodging, and also cheap lodgings with prostitutes. Over the butchery’s door there is a sign with an illustration of a smiling pig wearing an apron holding a cleaver. I don’t like this sign, I never had. I almost whisper in the apprentice’s ear, do you see that? It will be you one day’. There are large glass windows of good quality with only a minimal amount of warping. The lines of cuts of meat, of sausages, ribs and the decapitated heads of livestock are visible through the window. ‘It will be you one day.’

    The apprentice has never been here by himself before. He’s hesitant at the door. Perhaps he’ll miss the man lying on his young shoulders one day. He shifts the body. He sighs. He looks up at the door and knocks three times, thinks about it for a second, and moves back so that when the door opens, he will be outside of the way.

    The butcher is loud, round and rosy. He’s wealthy for what he is. It’s hard to come into the variety of meat he has, and human meat is always the most difficult, especially since it is dependent on friendship with the short-lived hangmen. It is always sold quickly for its healing properties.

    “Boy!” says the butcher, and laughs, “Perhaps I should think about learning your name now that your master is dead. Anyways, I should be saying congratulations. How does it feel, your first killing?”

    “It feels fine, sir,” says the apprentice mellowly, “I spent a long time getting ready for it.”

    “Will I be seeing you more in the future?” asks the butcher, a good businessman, as he leads them into the shop.

    The apprentice is careful with the body now that he's out of the public eye, he holds it close to him like a blanket, as if he’s scared it’s going to knock into the racks of meat. He’s that bull in a China shop, the one that knocked over a shelf shattered a few dozen bowls and then was put to death to recoup the owner’s costs. They move slowly to the back of the shop, and he needs to twist his shoulders for the body to fit through the door into the butcher’s workroom.

    “There’s a larger door out back,” says the butcher, noticing, “You know, for when I get the normal type of meat, large cows and such.”

    “I knew that,” says the apprentice, “I went that way with my master once.”

    “You never know,” said the butcher, “I didn’t pay much attention before. Didn’t think you could do it.”

    “He agreed to it.” And for that they’re silent.

    There’s a stone slab in the middle of the room and the apprentice places the body on it slowly, straightening out the legs and arms so that it looked like a proper body and not just a sack of meat. He stares at the body for a moment, and in that moment, I wonder if he’s feeling sentimental. His first kill? Or maybe something deeper than that. The man who raised him.

    The butcher starts getting ready for work, cutting open the shirt of the body and removing the pants in a similar fashion.

    There are small windows in the room in the shape of little slits overhead and when the apprentice is done with the body, he watches those slits. They only show the opposite side of the street and people walking by. And in general, the people here are not particularly interesting looking people. Interesting people are those rich ladies with complicated dresses or fine young gentlemen wearing daring colors that you see on richer streets, but there is a prostitute dressed up in red and wearing a multitude of fabric jewelry so that it dangles and glints off her ears, neck, every finger, and across her waist. She moves with purpose and with flirtation, twisting this way and that to wink at passing men. I wonder if he imagines that she winks at him too. I wonder if that’s what he’s going to spend his first paycheck on. If he’s looking for a substitute of human comfort.

    “He looks good for a hanging,” says the butcher, conversationally.

    “I suppose I’m lucky then.”

    The butcher turns around to his wall of tools. “Honestly speaking it makes the job worse,” he says, “makes them seem more human. You can pretend a bit when they come into death, and it disfigures them. You don’t look at those bodies and say this was a person once, but when death doesn’t touch them so much, it’s harder to ignore.”

    “It’s harder to do it to someone you once knew too, I suppose,” says the apprentice.

    “It is,” says the butcher, he turns back to the table holding a saw now, “which is why I’m going to start with the head. It doesn’t look so human without the head. And it is better me butchering him than some other fool who doesn’t know the first thing about cutting up human meat”

    The body is naked; it is pale and there aren’t a lot of scars. The hands are callused from work, and the hair is brown of a middling length slightly messed up from the rough treatment after death. The eyes are closed, the body died unconscious. The shape of the rope is indented along the neck. I wasn’t expecting to last this long, to see the body debased, but they do say the spirit lingers longer after a violent death.

    “Do you want to keep those?” the butcher gestures to the clothing scraps tossed into a basket by the door.

    The apprentice shakes his head. I wonder if it’s too hard to speak.

    Just last week I was accused of murder and went to court soon after. We are always accused of murder at some point. There was a trial but there wasn’t any real pretense of trying to discover either innocence of guilt. This is just the life cycle of the job. I had accused my own master of murder before. How many years ago was that? Probably at least twenty?

    With one hand the butcher holds the head still and with the other he lines up the saw to the rope marks on the neck. And soon there is the noise of cutting through it all. The apprentice gags a bit.

    “I don’t think I can watch,” says the apprentice shakily,” I mean, do I need to watch?”

    “I don’t know what you’re saying,” says the butcher, “you’re the one who put the rope around his neck.”

    “I killed him, isn’t that enough?”

    His eyes are misty, and he takes one last look at the butcher, collects himself and says, “tell me when you’re done, I’ll collect the body.”

    “Wait a second boy.”

    The apprentice waits at the door.

    “Let me get your name, so I know who I’m sending this back to.”

    “I’m Willis Warran, sir,” says the apprentice.

    “I’ll give you the head before you go,” says the butcher.

    And then the disconnected head in Willis’s hands. He shudders. He feels the hair of it in his grip. And it’s coarse.

    They say he won’t be a true hangman until he consumes the flesh of his master.


    Three days after the hanging, a package in the shape of a box arrives to the front steps of the house. That pig from the shop logo is drawn on one side. Willis opens the door, sees the package and turns back towards the house as if there was another person there waiting for a package. His mouth opens; a single syllable escapes before he remembers. He has a hard time thinking of it as his house. It was still, when he is honest, his master’s house. He nudges the box with one foot, it's heavy. He glances back inside again. He’s been talking to the head which he left in a bowl of ice in the kitchen.

    He didn't know what to do with the head, you never cook a head, but he was thinking about visiting a taxidermist.

    There is so much person inside a head.

    He has experience carrying bodies. He lifts the box and brings it to the kitchen table. It’s within eye view of the head in the bowl. The box is wooden, and he has to bring out the other side of a hammer to pry the nails out. There’s ice in the box too, not just the meat, which is why he supposes it was heavier than expected.

    The heart is on top. He starts the stove. He slices the heart into strips with a knife. He takes out a pan. There’s some oil in the cabinet. You’re supposed to marinate it. That’s what my master had told me, that’s what I did. It tenderizes the meat and improves the flavor. He doesn’t. He cooks it there and plates it. It isn’t right. It looks like meat. Like the scraps sold cheap by the butcher. It should be something more. I still remember the flavor of my own master’s heart on my tongue, and the feeling of emptiness that followed. He takes the first bite and makes a face.

    “There’s no magic here,” he tells the head.

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