“I’m telling you, you're making a mistake!”

“Tie his hands!”

“His hands’re already tied, get his feet! Fucker just kicked me!”

My legs burned as I kicked at the dirt, trying to get them under me. The horse that had dragged me for the last two miles had stopped, the rope that connected me to its rider yanking me back to the ground. Everything was blurry. From pain, from the gunk of dirt and blood that was crusting onto my eyes, from the blistering sun in the sky.

Men hollered and hooted around me like they were front row at a circus and I was the clown, every yell a surprise from a direction I couldn’t see. Weight piled on my legs, hands clamping them together as they looped something around my ankles, trapping them together.

“Look at ‘im shake!” one of them cackled, drawing a round of laughter.

“You men, please, listen! My name is hrghk!” The rope slipped over my neck and knotted tight, crushing the air out of my throat as my worst fear went from looming over me to resting its hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t get out more than a strangled sound - and that’s exactly what they were doing. Strangling me. And that was just the beginning.

“Get around to the other side of the tree, I’ll throw the rope and you boys pull! Count of three, ready?”

I struggled to my knees, turning to every blurry shape I could see as it moved around me. I just wanted- needed them to look at me. Just one of them. Any of them. Look at me as a man, as a person. I was scared. Terrified, and I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to see my mother again. I wanted to have a wife. A family. A little house with a garden at the side and a big apple tree I could watch grow and grow old under.

My fingers dug at the thick braid of rope at my neck, until the skin stung. My eyes were watering and it felt like a lifetime had passed. Then I heard the count of “three!” and the ground shot away from under me, my neck straining as my whole body hung from it.

I tried my best. I swear I did. I made every sound I could, and half the ones I couldn’t, trying to make something like a sentence. I begged. I pleaded. My face burned with hot streaks from my eyes as they ignored me, watching me suffer and struggle in the air.

“Tie it off, quick! Sonofabitch’s heavy!”

“Ooh, he’s worming around alright. How long you think he’ll last?”

“Moving around that much? He’ll tire out fast. I give him two minutes.”

“Shoot, I can make it happen right now.” There was the distinctive click of a gun’s hammer being pulled back.

“Don’t. I want to watch him dance.”

“Marshall? You sure?”

“Question me again and I’ll run you up there beside him.”

I couldn’t believe it. I wished I couldn’t believe it. But the fear was too strong. If my legs had any strength in them, they’d be shaking beneath me. If my heart had any room left to ache, it’d be breaking in my chest. I wasn’t Daniel. I couldn’t look at my lions without fear, and the notion that this was it, that twenty three years of life was about to end out here in the middle of a dry patch of Nowhere, Alabama left me without any thoughts left in my head. So I did what I always did when I didn’t know what else to do, just like my parents taught me.

I prayed.

Dear Father. The thoughts had a full stop to them, as my chest burned and a cough tried to escape before dying against the rope. New tears grew from the corners of my eyes as I stared out at the horizon, trying to keep myself still in the air. Dear Father, thank you for this life. Thank you for…for letting me see to this point.

“He dead already? He stopped moving.”

“He’s still breathing. We’ll wait.”

Thank you for your guidance. For my mother and my father, for keeping them in good health. For Jackie, and for giving her a husband who appreciates her. For blessing me with the family that I have, the opportunity to see your light. To see the rivers and the mountains of this great nation. To-

Something hit me, hard and pointy, and I jerked. The rope squeezed my throat a little tighter, forcing the little sip of air I’d managed to take back out, leaving me spinning slowly.

To learn to read and to write. To live as a free man, emancipated and beyond the Era of Enslavement. To learn a trade and to have a roof over my head and food in my stomach near every night of my life. I wish that everyone can be so blessed. I…

I lost my thoughts. I didn’t know what else to say. What else to be thankful for. What was a man supposed to be thankful for on the day he dies? What was he supposed to say or think? This was the kind of thing I said near every day of my life but, today, it rang hollow. And as the rope slowly twisted me around, bringing a handful of old ropes into view, half of them still swinging with long-dead remains, something inside me broke.

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I don’t want to die. Please, God. I don’t ask for much for myself. I just don’t want to suffer like this. I don’t want anyone to suffer like this. Dying for a crime of nothing. Beaten stupid and tortured like a dog. How could you let this happen to us?

There wasn’t a response. There never was; at least, not for me. I could almost hear my mother’s voice, telling me “there’s an answer, you just don’t have the ears for it.” I’d heard it so many times in my life, it being the last thing in my life felt…alright. I closed my eyes, trying to put aside the anger, the bitterness, the shame and guilty at being angry and bitter.

Father. Please guide these souls into your hands. These men making a…sport of evil. And everyone who died because of them. Who died here. Everyone who died for nothing good, no cause at all. That’s my final prayer. Into thy hands, I commend my spirit.

Amen.

With that final prayer, I felt something leave me. The touch of the Lord, taking me into my hands. And I let myself go into it.

🜍﹠☿ 🜍﹠☿ 🜍﹠☿ 🜍﹠☿ 🜍﹠☿

The second day of being a corpse was a lot like the first. There was a lot less panic, a lot less fear. When I first ‘woke up’, I thought it was a miracle. I’d been delivered, and I was alive. Then my body stayed still despite my urging. The world was a vague mess of colours between eyes that were only open because my face was swollen. And…nothing happened.

For that first day, I was terrified. Was this it? This had to be Hell. Trapped here in a body destined to rot? Swinging from the tree I died in, strange fruit never to ripen, only grow fat and burst.

By the second day, those concerns weren’t as pressing. That wasn’t because I was less worried that my soul had been damned, and that I’d missed my eternal salvation. It was because the buzzards had shown up.

Like it wasn’t bad enough I had to suffer the indignity of this. Being accused of having relations with some woman I’d never even met, much less against her will. I’d never let myself be alone with a woman longer than a minute unless I had intentions to marry her. Potiphar’s wife was a lesson that stuck with me. And this wasn’t even that. This was more like Potiphar’s neighbor, and the neighborhood hoodlums, out to put a black man passing through in his place.

Maybe that wasn’t why. Some people didn’t need a reason. But would it be better or worse if they were just evil murderers? And thieves. They’d taken my shoes, my belt, and my watch, and now the buzzards wanted to take what little I had left.

By day three, the buzzards were gone. They’d picked at what they could reach for a while, getting most of my left hand and my right eye. Didn’t make much difference. Wasn’t like I could hold anything. Wasn’t seeing anything of note. Only thing of interest was a flicker of orange that hung around after the sun went down.

My mother always told me not to stare into the damned thing but, heh, guess I don’t have a choice in it anymore.

Day four, the buzzards came back. They didn’t bother me, though. I just heard their wings rustling as they came to pitch.

Day five, the orange glow got bigger. A lot bigger, getting wider. About half as wide as everything I could see. And I could hear more wings. Couldn’t tell what the buzzards were up to, though.

Day six, I heard sounds below me. I didn’t know what it was until I heard a bark. Dogs. A lot of them, seemed like. Were they waiting on me to fall down? There some sort of signal between them and the buzzards?

Day seven, somebody whispered something to me. It would’ve made me jump if I could move. Instead, it just terrified me like it was the first day all over again. I’d almost forgotten this was Hell. Not just a quiet forever of rotting away and boredom. Separation of the worst kind. Lost to my family. Lost to the world.

Lost to God.

Day eight, the orange glow got…clearer. I couldn’t see anything clear, but I could see it. Lines. Curves. Shapes. A square block of them, each shape the same width and equally spaced like newsprint.

Day nine, I realized something funny. I could see the glow - through both eyes. And with the eye that was missing, the one the buzzards had made a snack of, I could read it. I didn’t know what it said. Those letters weren’t English, not any English I ever saw in my life. The words didn’t mean anything to me either. But the meaning wrote itself into my head.

And I remembered, I was in Hell, and tried to put it back out as soon as possible.

Hands clamped around my skull, wet and cold like paper that shredded in water. They were like iron, peeling my eyelids apart, the mess of colours turning into a stripe of night over dark nothingness. My head jerked down to the ground, the orange glow laying flat on the ground like a sheet of paper. For the first time, I was seeing all of it, the meaning writing itself into my head.

I tried to struggle, but I couldn’t move. The slimy fingers slipped down my head as they held it, as understanding I didn’t want wrote itself over things I couldn’t remember anymore but felt my heart tremble as they slipped away. The dogs below looked up at me, perfectly silent as I failed to resist whatever had taken hold of me.

Bark! Scare it! Help me! I screamed and rattled inside my head.

A faintly whistling wind was the only response. It cut through me like an icy knife, a shiver running through my body as I felt cold for the first time in days. Heat built up inside my ruined eye, the shapes- the words being peeled away from the ground, flying up to meet me.

Names. Places. Dates. Descriptions of the worst things. Things that made me want to tremble. Want to shake. That made my death feel like a pleasant afternoon.

There was a loud flapping of wings that sent all the dogs scattering, barking as they raced off into the distance. My eyes tracked them as they disappeared past the edges of my vision, the grip on my skull keeping my head still. The hard dirt beneath me swelled upwards, pregnant with something vile beneath the surface, and popped into the air. Something gray and slimy spewed forth, one after the other, stirring into motion.

I lost sight of it as the hand gripping my head tilted me upwards, an eyeless face of slimy gray skin staring at me. Its second hand gripped my jaw, prying it open. I shook my head, keeping my mouth shut, but there was no resisting. It pulled my mouth open, cocked its head to the side, and slowly began to crawl its way into my throat.

It was torture. Every cracking sound of its skeletal body snapping to fit inside my mouth, the oily pudding feeling of it going down my throat, the unsettling weight of something inside me even as I felt nothing physical there. The branch I hung from shook and I twisted my head to look, seeing dozens of the things climbing towards me, dozens more dragging themselves from the hole in the ground that spawned them and making their way towards the tree. And I remembered.

I was in Hell.