supplicium post mortem

Hummingbirds sounded like gigantic flies. Frogs sounded like strumming elastic bands. The soft crack of the wine glass hitting the floor of the Rector’s pantry sounded like the way people died – undramatic catastrophe.

“Pay attention, Padawan,” James was saying. She tried to concentrate on the rope he was holding. “You’ve got to let go at the top of the arc.”

“Or I’ll swing back and get smashed, I know.”

“Don’t be scared.”

The wine they filched was supposed to kill fear. In him it seemed to work. If she let go in time, she’d fall beyond the rocks. It was like flying, he said, especially in the dark.

“What will Carrstairs do if he finds out?”

James shrugged, moon on his bare shoulder. “You afraid of the third degree from the Rector?”

She shrugged, too, wishing it could kill the burning in her stomach. The Rector went in for more like the sixteenth degree, though he spread it out over a day or more, catching you unawares when you didn’t know you were being questioned. She wondered how it would feel to be held across Mr. Carrstairs’s knee, his foot braced against a boulder, while he applied a switch to wet skin. James wore faint marks two days later. It would be a change, anyhow, from being treated distantly out of pity for her circumstances.

The Rector saw her too much, the others not at all.

She took the rope from James’s hands and backed up the slope.

Read other folks writing this week:

• Rafi
• Nettagyrl
• Travis King
• PapaTomLA