imagine how laughable I must have looked like to him that day, standing on the platform with a noose around my neck. Me, a common girl, unwed and unclaimed with a belly full of an unwanted child. The crowd was staring up at me in disbelief. I saw my father and mother standing at the back. She was weeping uncontrollably. My father's face was emotionless, stern. I must have been the last person in this village they would have suspected of adultry. Even thinking of the word makes my heart falter. It was raining, and my hair was dangling in my face. I noticed that the rope that bound my hands were becoming loose, but I didn't make an effort to free them. I could have, of course. I could have easily slipped my wrists through the loops and ran. But I didn't. I stood there in all my stubborn shame and listened as the priest gave me my last rights. His words seemed to be drowning with the rain and meant nothing as I locked eyes with the man who placed me here on this platform. Hate was boiling out of my eyes and into his, but it made no difference. I was going to die. And so was his child. Exactly the way he wanted it. The priest came to the part I was waiting for.
"Do you have any last words?"
I dropped my head and smirked, and was relieved the executioner couldn't see behind my dripping mass of hair.
"Yes..." I whispered. I lifted my head and locked eyes with him once more. To my shock, I found tears clinging to the corner of his eyelashes.
"ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?" I screamed like a banshee. "Even now your child grows, yet you do nothing! I'm going to die and lose everything, yet you get to continue with your meager existance!"
The crowd was searching for whom I was addressing.
The executioner was approaching me.
"You'll do it again, you'll do it again and again and again!"
The floor dropped from beneath my feet, and air seemed to be stolen as I tried to inhale it. My eyes darkened as the noose began to sever me from this world. My breathing subsidded, my eyes blackened...and I felt no more. The rain seemed to turn to bright sunrops. My drenched clothes seemed to be baking in an unseen sun. I inhaled my sweet freedom for the first time. You see, we were both liberated in all this. He was freed of the tempting
farmgirl that ruined his marriage and sent him into bankruptcy. I am free of the man and of the life.
Ecstacy surrounds me every moment. I am free. Free, free, free.