“If only this world had shown me a little more mercy…”

The man trembled as he spoke the tearful string of words, struggling to hold himself upright as his executioners dragged him up the sodden wood pedestal towards the guillotine. The crowd encircling him started a restless chant of slurs and mockery directed at his expense, tossing rotting vegetables and whatever obscene or filthy objects they could find.

“Traitor!”

“Adulator!”

“Slum!”

In the reflection of the guillotine’s sharpened blade, the man found himself: a pitiful creature rendered to nothingness. A corpse surviving off a weak heart and labored breaths.

Driven by a restless, internal urge, the man began to rise, lifting himself upward weakly despite the furious tug of his executioners. “Listen to me!” He roared. “Cease your lunacy for a simple minute, would you?”

It took the onlookers a few moments to respond to his wail. They continued to shout and beckon at him in tones of fury, tossing handfuls of gravel and dirt at his roughly hewn face, but they had significantly quieted down. Perhaps they were slightly shocked at his ability to utter a single word.

“Are you all so interlocked in your own fits of rage?” He clenched his jaw, where only a few of his rotting teeth remained. “So blinded by your own desire to watch me suffer that you would find it enjoyable to watch me perish?”

The audience was now plagued by a raging sea of silence.

The man continued, ignoring the sharp hiss of his executioners as they struggled to drag him forward.

“Don’t you see the state that you all have rendered me to?” The man cried, tears dragging down his scarred cheeks. “Have you all lost any sense of empathy? Of pity for someone who carries pain and memory just as you do? I am a human being, for goodness sake!

“I reckon that not one of you knows who I really am!” The man now used whatever strength was left in his eroding body to resist the yank of the executioners as they set him onto the guillotine. “That you would find satisfaction in watching anybody experience what I have, even if they were good at heart!” He gazed up at the fading sunlight above, erupting into an uncontrolled sob before the blade above his neck was raised and brought down in one fluid motion.