Short Story / The Executioner Steps In (Analysis)
THE EXECUTIONER STEPS IN
By Tim Walker
In a dream, I prayed to God. When I awoke, I tried to hold on to it, but all that remained was a fragile network of impressions, thin here, overlapping there. I had been praying, though, and meaning it, and I had to know how I did it. I had never been taught to pray in a way that would convince God I was sincere, but now I was sure the know-how was there somewhere, implanted, hidden in my brain. I just had to find it, and, I believed, soon.
Awake now to the sound of premeditated silence and the smell of damp canvas, I delved inside. My mind was a deep, dark bag of junk and I fumbled through its contents blindly. Clichés and cobwebs mostly. I wanted to remember how to pray and I hoped the dream could tell me, if only I could worm my way back in and sort it out.
Part of the dream felt like part of a separate dream I’d had some other night, recurring, but I can’t tell for sure. It occurs to me that my mind, unlocked in my sleep, may have tricked me, had me believing that I’d dreamt some of it before, when I never really had. Your brain has that shuffled deck way it shares dreams with you after you wake up, playing games, mixing and matching all it wants - a run-on sentence from Hell - something you could maybe make sense of if the wording was better, the structure more obvious: By the time you wake up, who knows what happened in what order and did it happen really, like maybe when you were younger or sleeping before, or have you dreamed it night after night or just dreamed that you dreamed it night after night and did you really wake up? Running on and on, running together.
Its best, one could say, to remember nothing at all, sleep as a total void in your existence.
This dream was scattered all over my mind, brief excerpts. Passively eluding my efforts to organize things:
I know now how it feels to have my neck bared to the guillotine’s blade, how the waiting feels, trapped in a finale’ devoid of pity or salvation. It may as well have been real. How could I ever be more terrified? The man gripping the lever above wore a mask, but I could see his face anyway. Or I knew what he looked like already. No emotion there, only deadened eyes and a straight mouth. He did not care that I, framed by the tracks of the guillotine’s blade as I knelt before him, said, “I am innocent”. Empathy was not his job.
The lever was his job.
One time or at some point, dreaming, I was the executioner, and there was no reasoning with me. I saw only the doomed before me. There was a war on, too, I believe, and I was one of six men selected to be the firing squad; six was natural, seemed natural, but there could have been ten or twelve or twenty, or just me. We or I sat our regular soldiering duties aside for this, whatever they might have been, since I could not recall having been a soldier prior to then. I did not sleep the night before, sitting alone in my olive drab tent, so I could not have dreamed any of this within the dream already in play. Could I?
Sometimes it was like I was lying there the night before the execution, terrified, yet managing to be thinking of other things, distracted. Forget that we six would pull our triggers tomorrow and a fellow countryman would die. He had erred, not me. I would kill this man and he would never see my face. Sometimes you wear the hood, sometimes the guy on the other side wears it. Sometimes the executioner, sometimes the condemned. By the time the executioner steps in, the time for mercy has passed. I learned this at some point, sleeping.
So in my dream, I believe I have faced the executioner previously, in dreams dreamt, as I do now. Very confused and confusing here, blurred lines as I am before the executioner as I am the executioner before the executioner I am before him the executioner is before me...shifting images, layers over layers, peeling up corners, peeking under. And at some point, I had prayed.
And just maybe I stood in front of a firing squad, twitching in my stupor, terrified and trying to wake up. Sometimes, maybe, there is a guillotine is a wide-bladed axe is a six man squad a gallows is an electric chair...Its all so thin now, waking. Sifted remnants of my mind’s journey through sleep. Most of it is carried away, lost in a whirlpool of fragmented stimuli. Only a confused theme remaining.
But I had prayed. Prayed! In all my life I have never prayed, never felt or understood the need. Why should I? If I am under divine scrutiny it seems like I would know, and then maybe I’d care... Care beyond the fear of the long sleep. It seems that only in sleep do I evidence a belief that there is anything for us after death, Heaven, Hell. Polarized. You believe, or you do not.
Oh, but with that wicked blade above the back of my neck, prayer came easy.
That much I do remember.
Forgive my sins, dear God. Thank you for my life. I am sorry I waited so long to pray to you. Forgive me.
And I meant every word of it.
Easy.
But now, I wonder...
When I am faced with death, for real, I want to be able to pray. Pray and mean it, mean it like you would have to if you wanted it to work. There is no way to trick God, to pull a fast one.
Then or before, I was a member of a firing squad. Tomorrow I would pull the trigger pull the handle the lever the switch...The night, the eve of the execution, seemed endless. Time is stretched or condensed or was disregarded or backwards.
I sat in a tent, alone with a rifle and a Bible, my companions. The rifle was not yet loaded, dangerous potential, lying next to the Bible on my cot. I did not touch either one. They were for looking at. And I remember remembering a rule that said one man’s gun would be loaded with blanks, a bang without a bullet, and it might be you, and you never killed anybody. Would that make a difference to God? No one would know who was not a killer the next day, only who was killed...this bound and blindfolded countryman. But, truthfully, I cannot say I knew who the condemned was at all, except for the moments when it was to be me.
And images swirl sometimes and I am outside, maybe kneeling, or standing with my back to a wall, and my voice is saying “I am innocent” and my mind is crying forgive my sins dear God.
I had a view from above, at some point, like God perhaps, maybe a rooftop above a town square; or was I higher up really, higher than I could actually be? A place below where public executions might be held. I saw people walking around, caught in the circle of my sight. Was there a guillotine down there? Did I hold a rifle? Why was I here?
The guillotine could be a firing squad and a brick wall or a noose and a wooden trapdoor or hooded axeman. Somebody has to pull the lever fire the gun drop the trapdoor swing the axe. I am on one side of it or on the other. Forgive my sins oh God.
I’ve heard that if you die in your dream, you die for real. I awoke just before the blade fell, the back of my neck like ice. Was I to be spared? Am I awake? Is it tomorrow?
Even with my eyes wide open, it is dark. The prayer will not come. If only I could recall that part where I knew how...
I am the atheist in the foxhole.
I can only hope that when the guns fire, I do not wake up.
END
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I noticed a lot of “had” or “has”. Lots of passive words that often may be replaced by active words or taken out all together. A few examples from the first few paragraphs are…
“I had been praying”
“I had to know”
“I had never been”
“may have tricked me”
It’s the whole, showing, not telling idea. All the could have, should have been, might be, can be replaced by stronger words that create a better flow and stronger imagery.
I like the dream, and I would really like to be placed into more. In the dream what do you sense. Is the air thick, or a stench in the air. Does your neck itch from the wood. Go into the senses more, it helps the reader feel as if they are there. Do that, and I think this piece would strike the emotions of the reader as well.
Keep it up. _
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