Damn you, Eschie! Now we have to stand at the back! I
told you it was a waste of time trying to convince your wife
to come along.

I thought she might find today’s execution
of interest, Sinnie.

I’ve known her far longer than you, Esch, and not once
have I seen her chomp at the bit to witness a flay and
quartering, even of a Jew or a Jew-sympathetic, to rid us of
this Great Mortality. Probably because she’d rather stay home
and chomp at someone else’s bit…

That’s a fine attitude to have about your own
sister, Sin! Would you also like to dig up the
plague-pit in which your parents lie and piss on
their skulls?

Such a rabid little cuckold! Look at where your nagging got
us. We missed our chance to hear the evidence, to spit on
the penitent, to boo and curse his soul. We don’t even know
if he’s a Jew or just a filthy Jew-lover!

Don’t you worry, Sinnie. If he’s up on that
platform, he’s guilty of one or the other. If the
exact nature of his faith is of such importance
to you, ask one of our fellow rabble.

But they’re roused. We’re never going to get a straight
answer now. They’ve cut his clothes from his body, but
from this far back I can’t see if that dongle is as God
created or all Moses-like.

Then you best get yourself roused and get
into the game.

You knew I wanted a new trophy, Eschie, and this is
probably the last execution of the season. If I don’t get
myself a trophy, I might have to resort to one of those
confounded masks to make it through winter!

Never, Sin! Those masks hide your face
from God, and he will no doubt mistake you
for one of the heathens who brought this
affliction down upon us!

Then tell me how I am going to get myself a piece of
penitent from all the way back here?

Don’t you already have a cheek from a
sodomite? A Jew’s fingernail? Even a foot
from that heretic, what’s-her-face? Your
collection is famous for miles, Sin.

Time, Esch, is the great despoiler. The foot looks more like
discarded kidney nowadays, the fingernail more like a chip of
ancient amber.

A shame…

What a team we were that day, Eschie! Remember how you
clambered up my back and launched from my shoulders to
catch that foot?

She was such a small girl.

Who?

The foot.

You speak with sympathy about a blasphemer, Eschew E.
Hughes?

Just never made sense to me
how someone so young...

Your tongue may end up on my wall if you continue this
way.

Point taken, Sin-Deny Nash.

You harken the lesson behind my name and keep your
thoughts pure, lest bubos rain down on your house. You
fool! You got me all distracted, and I missed the first cut!
Will our ill fortune never end? You should have let your
wife be, or dragged her here by the teats if you wanted her
here so bad.

I am just tired of the doxy getting the house
to herself to do her whoring while I tend to
the overlord’s pigs. Maybe she could stretch
her legs for something other than putting
them behind her head.

You just check yourself there, Eschie. I may stand you
calling my sister a wench, but a doxy? I expect you to make
penance for that one tomorrow.

You think God would inspire my parents to
name me Eschew-Evil and then set the
Pestilence on them if He didn’t fancy me
pure enough to see the Horned One’s work
in all its disguises? Your sister is a doxy, so
perhaps your Christian name is more about
denying the sin in front of you than your
adherence to His word. And perhaps God
inspired your parents to name her Increase
not to indicate her propensity for children
but for the bosom she would grow to lure me
into my sham of a marriage.

Blah blah blah, Eschie. I tire of your sermons. Here we
have the righteous sight of an irredeemable flailing as he is
flayed and all you can talk about is my sister. Look, the
rummer! Quick, hand me the tankards and I’ll get them
filled.

Ask your beloved Increase why she gives
my dishes away to her studs.

We have no tankards?

I swear she’ll one day bestow my piss pot to
a lover with such predilections.

Well, considering her pocky disfigurement from a bout
with the red fever, she was lucky to marry as industrious a
man as you, Eschie.

Sadly, Sin, your dear sister Increase has
done nothing but decrease my holdings in
this world. My contract of serfdom
keeps getting extended because I fall behind on my
quota.

Perhaps it’s best.

Best?!? Count our distance from the flaying
tools as a mark of your good fortune!

Such the dramatist! This execution has got you in quite a
state. Have you ever considered that perhaps my older
sister is your salvation? That to bear her wantonness,
betrayal and theft of your essence puts you on high next to
that martyr of the boils and slaughtered cattle?

Is that the one with the wife of salt and the
threesome with his daughters?

Not in the least.

Then the one who burned his own daughter
for the glory of God?

Wrong again, Eschie. All these years, and could it be only
now I discover you’re a bastard pagan? Even worse, a
freethinker?

Had you remembered the martyr’s name
from the start, Sinnie, this scuffle would have
been long over and you could have
enjoyed the sight of those skeins of flesh
flung to the crowd.

They’ve flung the flesh?!? You turd! You know how much
I love the flinging of the flesh! Today’s penitent has quite
the set of lungs on him, to be sure. I doubted we would hear
him caterwaul from this far back.

That is quite the screech...

Let’s use the mob’s distraction to better our vantage point,
Esch. Quick, behind these quartering horses! We’ll follow
them through the crowd and get us a fine spot for the
disembowelment.

But Sin...

Here’s our opening. Why do you hesitate? Are you worried
this mare might kick your heart right out of your chest?

I’m just not sure I want to get any closer...

I’m kidding, Esch. Looks as though this mare has a bit of a
gimp, anyway. Should be safe.

I’ll be fine back here, Sinnie.

Nonsense. Travel in my wake. This bitch of a horse will
never get a clean shot at you.

I can wait for you.

Eschew Evil Hughes, son of Hugh Kilner! Once we were
boys at these things, kicking the condemned’s head around
the field. Now you’re just a cuckold lacking both humor
and a sense of adventure.

You are a loathsome wretch indeed. Make way.

Ah, Eschie, my faith in you is restored. I remember now
why I hitched you to my trollop of a sister.

Shocking that they’d use a gimpy horse for a
quartering. How do they expect this lame
beast to rip a grape from a bunch, much less
a hip from its socket?

Not so fast, Eschie. A sudden stop, and your head will go
straight up her quim.

It’ll be the most I’ve gotten in a year. Come
on, hag! Such a sad state we live in when
they won’t spare the quality stallions to
entertain the masses.

What did I promise, brother-in-law? Here we are, close
enough to get sprayed with blood, if we’re lucky. Looks
like we’ve come just in time for the disembowel...but look!
Isn’t that Black Francis?!?

What does it matter, Sin, who is on the table?

They’ve hacked off his beard, but, sweet Jesu, I swear that
is none other than the smithy.

Weren’t you just scolding me a minute ago
about pitying penitents?

I’m just shocked to see our own Black Francis on the table,
carrying on about his innocence and all. What put him in
these straits, I wonder?

Conspiring with Jews, of course. Rebuffing
pork when it was clearly juicy and
delectable.

Now how would you know that, Esch? We missed the
indictment.

An educated guess, that’s all. You know old
BF is prone to show his true colors when
deep in his cups.

True. I guess it’s been a while since we’ve seen one of our
own up there. Remember the days of Lord Bastion? A finer
feudalist one could never find. Kept our community pure
and God-fearing. An execution a week, sometimes more.
Spared no expense. Penitents from near and far: Samuel the
Barber one day, a dirty Persian the next, blubbering on in
his infidel’s tongue even with his genitals stuffed into his
mouth. Not to mention the guest executioners and their
array of devices: the saw, the Danni’s stool, the Pear of
Anguish!

And to think it was a bushel of tainted grain
that took Lord Bastion down.

It wasn’t the Pestilence that did him in?

No. St. Anthony’s fire was that which
flamed his way to St. Peter.

Whatever it was, it left us with his firstborn…

Little Bastion.

Little Bass, more like.

Exactly, Sinnie-D. Out ‘hunting’ with his
dandy henchmen day in and day out.

Why do you hook your fingers like so when you say
‘hunting,’ Escher-Eve?

Because no one can hunt for hours and have
not even a pheasant to show for it. Him and
his entourage, an effeminate lot to say the
least, all drunk and giggling and shushing
each other upon their return. Turpitude!
Notice we haven’t had a sodomite on the
platform since his reign began? For the
sodomites have taken over the castle!

Eschie! Speak like that of our overlord, and you’ll find
yourself on the platform!

Surprised I haven’t been up there already,
what with the executioner getting head from my
strumpet wife every time she takes her
constitutional.

That should be the least of your worries! Every married
woman in the province lusts after our Thomas the Twister.
I heard his dongle has cloven in twain from all his cavern
dives. Look there. Even as he hooks a loop of Black
Francis’s intestine onto the crank, those mothers waggle
their teats for his enjoyment.

I’d rather not think about Thomas’s cloven
John Thomas, thank you very much.

Ever the mule. This should cheer you up, Eschie: here
comes the intestine!

True. Look at it gleam in the sunlight!

And more, and more! Like a carnival trick.

That bastard smithy can beg all he wants.
There’s still a ream or two left in his belly to
pluck out.

Poor Frankie. Wasn’t it just last Tuesday we saw him at the
Tin Pestle? When he told that joke about your dear
Increase? That one about a regiment of halberds marching
into her honeypot towards the sound of another regiment
they figured were French? Turned out they were chasing
their own echo? Oh, that Frannie the Black. Sooty of skin,
sooty of soul...

...sooty of loin.

What was that, Eschie?

Pay no mind, Sin. They have quite a spool
of guts out of him now.

Am I to understand, Eschie-E, that you bore false witness
against our own smithy for tupping your wife? You
heathen! Scamp! Miscreant! Cocytic!

Someone had to pay for her betrayals. I just
hoped the jezebel would be here to see the
results of her licentiousness.

That should be you up there, defiler! I should denounce you
here and now.

You wanted a new trophy, didn’t you? Had
Black Francis not mounted the platform
today, we wouldn’t have had another
execution until the thaw. Look, they’re
tossing out lengths of intestine. Snag me
one, would you? Your reach is far greater
than mine.

Ours is a sad confederacy, bro-in-law. I guess I’d be
nothing to you if it weren’t for my height and my sister.

I’d be a righteous man, Sin, had I never met
your family. God certainly did a number on
your parents with the girls He gave them.
What does Chastity go for now?

Again with the calumny?

Cease your belly-aching. I haven’t seen her
pacing the front of the bawdyhouse all this
week.

Fine. If you really want to know, Chastity has been kicked
down to the basement due to her lazy eye and gangrene.
Last night her procurer took half a dozen chicken feet for a
romp with her. He didn’t even want the feet. Sent her home
with them so we could make stew.

That’s a lecherous feminine strain, you
Nashes. Pray you are blessed with boys,
should you ever marry.

Thanks to your example, Esch, I don’t have much
inclination towards putting my head in that sack.

I guess so. Not to mention that you still have
a whore living at home...

If I weren’t so desperate for something for my trophy
wall...

Now! Jump!

Aha! My knee plunged pretty deep into that old crone’s
gut, but I’m sure she’ll recover. Here, Eschie. For you.

Thank you, Sin. You’re a peach. Still warm.
And of goodly length. Dry this out, and it
will make a fine whip so I can flog your
sister and maybe hang myself afterwards.

Don’t talk nonsense, Eschie. Beat your wife, yes, but self-
murder? ‘Tis for apostates and sodomites. Ha, look who
I’m talking to. The Honorable Eschew Evil Hughes, pig
farmer and God-fearing Catholic. Oh goodie, they’re
hitching up the horses! Come here, old friend, and get up
on my shoulders. We should be ready the moment they hurl
Black Francis’s limbs to the crowd.

Can’t wait to see what comes flying our
way. Anything with ol’ BF’s black body hair
will match your rustic hovel well.

Perhaps this day will turn out fortunate after all.

God willing, Sinnie. May our efforts prove
to Him we no longer deserve this scourge he
thrust upon us. Come, stoop a little lower.

Richard Weems is the author of three short fiction collections: Anything He Wants (finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize), Stark Raving Blue and From Now On, You're Back. Recent appearances include North American Review, New World Writing, On the Run, 3Elements Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine. He lives and teaches in New Jersey.