When We Were Executioners Read Free

swear an oath like that.”
    She sat down across from him. There were teacups, with tea. They were supposed to be drinking it. Rachel and Jona both stared down into the brown pools of stale tea, and their restless hands upon the cups.
    Rachel yawned. She spoke to her tea, not him. “Do you know anything about hearts, Jona? The Senta know hearts. Hearts are not one organ. Inside a mother’s womb, two pulsing bags of blood seek their eternal mate.”
    Her hand reached out to his. She opened his palm, and traced a finger down his lifeline, then his loveline. She lifted it up to her own face. She placed it on her cheek.
    “Lungs are fine apart,” she said, “Hands do not need another but to clap. Brains gnarl like roots in the nothing of soul, and guts spin in knots around the nothing of hunger. But hearts are made by two complete parts merging together. Once the two pieces sense each other in the blood flow, they cross every bloody cliff inside of us. The arteries bind the halves close. The veins make love to each other in the life pulse that makes all life from love entwined.”
    She let go of his hand. He let it linger on her face.
    “Your tea is getting cold, Jona.”
    “Fate worse than death,” he said. He did not move his hand from her face. Then, he moved his hand. It went down to the table. He stood up. “I have to go,” he said.
    “Don’t you want tea?”
    He shook his head. “No... I did, but...”
    “Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”
    “Right,” he said. He sat back down. He picked up the teacup, and sniffed at it. He sipped a little. “It’s good,” he said.
    “So, what do you want to talk about?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I just wanted to see you. Was that one of the koans?”
    “No. It’s just something my mother taught me before she died.” Her face, the way she looked at him, makes me happy, because Jona was loved by someone before he died.
    * * *
    My husband and I feasted in the night on stolen meat. A sheep heavy with lamb, it slowed her down. We dragged her into the woods while the shepherds’ dogs cowered away from us.
    From the raw mutton, I showed this Senta wisdom to my husband, from the heart of the aborted lamb.
    In the daylight, we searched fetal birds peeled from their shells —their tiny grey bodies limp in our human palms, all blood and fluids and dying tissues. Just beneath the translucent skin, the organs pulsed and died in two distinct pieces that would no longer fully merge.
    He said nothing to me, nor I to him, after we proved this to ourselves. We ate what we had killed.
    Say something, my husband.
    I regret returning to the city because it means you will not be completely yours, completely mine. Too many bad smells. All of them his.
    That is not our place to choose. If Erin wills it…
    …we die on this trail. Eat, beloved, for tomorrow we may face Sabachthani’s executioners.
    As wolves we dashed into the city, not priest and priestess. We ran like wild dogs, snarling and biting and blood on our teeth.
    For three days we lived in the alleys like dogs. We slept in mud, and ate in the mud and snarled at everything that came near, all our skulls and papers always hidden deep under our fur. We had to slink our way through the streets to a small temple of Erin, near the harbor. We scratched at the back door until we were discovered and could enter in hiding, make arrangements for our stay. After dark, we slipped into a rented room dressed like foreign thieves. The innkeeper, greedy enough to have no curiosity, was paid to ignore us. Not even a maid came to our little room.
    We wrote to Lord Sabachthani by addressing the king, though the king would do nothing for us. We waited, hunting nothing. We told Lord Sabachthani that we would not hunt without his permission—only wait for word through a liaison of the temple.
    Wait and wait, then. So much paper arrived at a man’s door. He ruled this city while the king was too old, and too tired to take the reins