Paris: Année 1 de la République Mois de Messidor du Quintidi [FICTOID]

“He didn’t invent this,” said the drunken executioner.

“Invent what?” asked his assistant.

“This,” said the executioner, smacking one of the upright wooden grooves.  “The guillotine.  Dr. Guillotine did not invent it.”

“It bears his name.”

“Bah!  He merely perfected it.  Devices like this have existed for hundreds of years.”  With a conspiratorial wink he added:  “Our German cousins call it the falling axe.”

The executioner took another long draught from his wineskin.  Whenever they executed a noble he liked to urinate on the head as soon as it fell into the basket.

“I’ve been thinking of tying a cord tightly around their necks just before we drop the blade,” he said.

“Why?  Don’t we want them to be awake when we execute them?”

“Oui!  Precisely!” said the executioner.  “But as soon as the blade severs the head from the neck, all the blood flows out. Oh, they appear to blink and roll their eyes, but are they truly awake once their heads roll into the baskets?  I think not.

“But, if we tie a cord tightly around their necks then immediately drop the blade, well, then the blood won’t flow out.  They will have a few moments of exquisite consciousness, exquisite horror as they look up from the bottom of the basket and see me pissing on their faces.”

His assistant shook his head, unaware of the irony of this act.  He wanted justice, yes, but simply chopping their heads off ensured that.

He saw no need to follow decapitation with degradation.

Still, he was but a lowly assistant while the executioner…well, he was the executioner.

A roar erupted through the crowd surrounding the scaffold where the guillotine sat, and the people surged forward like a wave towards the tumbrel bearing a petite noblesse and his family to the guillotine.

Soldiers beat back the enraged crowd and led the family up the steps to their death.

First they brought the son, a young man in his early twenties.  He stood defiant in the face of the screaming crowd.

The family’s hands were already bound behind them, so all the assistant had to do was push him against the body board, tie his ankles together, fasten the straps, tilt the board forward, slide it up to the neck hole, drop the upper part of the lunette down to hold the head in place, then let the executioner himself yank the cord that dropped the blade and finished the job.

They unstrapped the body, rolled it off the body board and into a large rattan coffin, reset the machine, and brought the mother forward.

She appeared to be in her late fifties; without her satin gown and her jewelry and her pasty white make up and her powdered wig she seemed no different from the thousands of women screaming for her death.

Again they ran through the same procedure, again the blade fell, again they rolled the headless body off the machine and reset it.

They needed to sprinkle sawdust on the blood that gushed from the two bodies after they were executed, thus delaying the process.

Normally the executioner took the head of the family last, but as his bladder felt like bursting and he needed to relieve himself, he motioned for the soldiers to bring the older man up before his daughter.

As the assistant tied the petite noblesse to the body board, the executioner leaned in close to whisper in his ear:  “My wife and I lost two infants because we could not afford medicine for them.  My youngest son was trampled under a nobleman’s coach; he tossed out twenty sous for our suffering and was gone.  My eldest joined your army to fight in some stupid war to make you rich, and came back blinded and maimed; he died two years afterward.  My wife -- oh, how beautiful she was in her youth! -- my wife went to protest your injustice and received a sword slash to her face.  It became infected and she died.  When you are beheaded, fellow citizen, I will piss on your face.  Then I will behead your daughter.  And then I will sell her corpse to scoundrels who want to rape the offspring of the bastards who tyrannized them.  Take that to hell with you, monsieur.”

The petite noblesse’s stoic resolve broke and he looked at the executioner as if to beg him not to desecrate the corpse of his daughter but then they slammed the body board down, forward, locked him in place, and dropped the blade.

The crowd roared with approval as the executioner urinated on the three heads in the basket.

It felt almost anticlimactic when they executed the twelve-year old girl.  She cried and wept hysterically, repeating:  “Why are you doing this to me?  Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because you exist,” said the executioner, dropping the blade.

© Buzz Dixon