Psychopomp

“When the monster Felix Hogan was dragged from his cage, he emerged a sickly and feeble creature. What a cruel deception, the people thought, to harbor cruelty in such a pitiful vessel. Curses to his mind, body, and spirit rained upon him with a fury to match his crime, an aural and verbal tapestry containing in every stitch a roiling damnation from man with the hope the Ichorians will heed it all.

He begged for mercy, proclaimed once and more again of how he was tricked, how he was giving the victim what she wanted. He claimed sorrow…he never meant such harm and pled with the vestigial desperation of a periled animal. Give me death, he acquiesced, but please no suffering.

Of course, our frenzy of mortal judges macerated his every plea and demanded agonizing contrition. First, they hung him, making sure it never prematurely snapped his neck or kept him too deprived of air. How paradoxical it struck me to see his legs kick and kick for more life-sustaining air when to die this way would have been so merciful.

Then, with noose still on, they restrained him to a table and cut open his abdomen. As he thrashed, I could so clearly see the blade puncture, cut, and slice a slit through which they would pull his intestines for him and us all to behold. When finally, they tied him to the pulleys, his screams worsened, and all could see how his joints gave way little by little until they burst apart into six flesh pieces of a body once whole. We all learned the cries of a man could sound as an animal’s when pushed to the furthest threshold of imaginable pain, and it will be a cry to echo here for eternity.”

Letter by Amelia Argos, a patrician of the Haas Ward, to her

brother

In the 1256th year since the Exodus