Uneasy Lies the Head

Liberté

Egalité

Fraternité:

Quelles belles idées!

La tyrannie du peuple.

He hears them outside of his door, words spoken in hushed whispers and the shuffling of feet. He knows who they are, and what they want. They are after him. They are going to kill him. The whole country is going to watch and bear witness. Whatever he has to do, he has to do it fast. He is rational, knowing full well that most, if not all of his partners were either jailed, killed or suicide already. So he does the only sensible thing he found he can do for a man in his position. He raises the gun, pressing the barrel right up to his mandible, and quickly fires it.

The doctors did a very fine job fixing him up, for their time period anyway. The fellow awakened a few minutes after, lying in a cot, reaching out and clutching his broken and bandaged jaw in irritable pain. He lets out a small groan, he survived. He looks down at his shirt which was now coated in blood from the bullet in his jaw. The guards arrived to his bed, ordering him to come with them, that he was ready for his execution. The once thought to be “incorruptible” king of France obeyed. No use to resist any much longer.

The royal gentleman walked, expecting to be hung at the gallows. A fitting end it would be, he thought. Since he had, after all, fed the chute as the crowned was placed upon his head during the revolutions way back when during his rise to liberty, and later corruption. But then he saw fate, and froze solid.

There, in the center of the square, it stood. The killer of all killers. The decapitating horror that were only spoken about in fairy tales, of stories in the dark. The monumental slaughterer in all of its macabre glory. The monster that had swallowed the souls of numerous government officials. It of whose thirst must only be paid in blood.

There, in the center of the square, stood the guillotine.

The fallen king gulped audibly with newfound terror, slowly lurching towards his degrading doom. The crowd he was passing by gave silent, hushed whispers and small chuckles at his head, which was shaven as a precautionary act to fit the guillotine just right.

He was forced and fastened into his constraints once he reached the brutal liberator, a line of his men behind him waiting on the chopping block. With nothing much more to look at other than the thousands of different faces as though a play, he looked down at the empty basket, prepared to catch and contain. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

Shaky, he tries to make his final amendments, but his speech was soon cut short by the executioner removing the bandage. Whether it was a mistake or out of ill will was out of the question. The pain stung him as he starts to scream horribly, his jaw coming right off of its own hinge grotesquely. His final words being that ghastly screech of anguish. The most hardened of soldiers flinched at the sight of gore that was once a lower jaw at some point in time.

The crowd then bursts into chants as the gloved hand of the executioner finally fastens around the heavy switch.

The wood of the plank was wet and damp by this point. A thick scent of fear lingered in the air; an aroma of sweat, piss and blood. After a hauntingly, agonizing wait comparable to that of an eternity, the lever is pulled and the blade drops to sever the head from neck. Then, all the people of France cheered that day.