Hard Time for the Prisoner

“What?”  I think we all said that. 

 

The sergeant spun on his heels and charged to the prisoner tied to the post.  “I swear I have had enough of this,” he yelled.  “If not having to smoke was not your last request, I’m going to stuff this cigar back into your mouth and cram it down your throat!”

 

Maria stood there staring ahead with her blinded eyes.  Her jaw was quivering again.

 

“Well, answer me!”  The sergeant was fairly screaming now himself.  “Your time limit for last requests expires in the next five seconds.”

 

“I, I,”  she was stammering, “I w want the name of the woman who was just here.”

 

Now I was getting mad.  Had I just thrown my job away for nothing?  “Do you realize that he’s going to put that cigar back into your mouth?  Do you realize that you will have to face the aftermath of your shooting with your lungs filled with that cigar’s smoke?”  I was yelling.

 

She turned to me or rather she turned her face to the sound of my voice.  “I know,” she said simply.  She was still hacking but except for that, she had suddenly grown calm.  “I want to pray for her.”

 

The sergeant snorted and spat on the ground.  The men in the firing squad shook their heads in derision.  The sergeant said, “Alright but do you know that that prisoner was a Communist.  She was a terrorist.  She didn’t believe in any God and is now surely in hell.”

 

“Maybe, but I want to pray for her anyway.”

 

The sergeant was actually surprised.  “Do you mean that you will take this smoke so that you can have the name of a person you don’t even know and is already dead?”

 

Maria’s mouth worked into a sideways grin.  “I don’t suppose that I could get a two for one deal here, could I?”

 

The sergeant was stamping his foot, he was so beside himself.  “You’re out of time!  Now what is it?  Smoke or name?”

 

“Name.”

 

The sergeant spat the name into her ear.  He turned and glared at the clerk person.  “You got that?”  The prisoner nodded.

 

“Alright, now here’s your smoke.”  The prisoner stood silently staring ahead though her eyelids were shut by the pressure of the blindfold.  The sergeant held the cigar to his side and peered into the face of the prisoner.  The prisoner could not look back.  She just stood there with her lips together with sadness but acceptance.

 

The head guard said to the sergeant, “I think I can help you out with that.”  He produced a set of noseplugs from his pocket.  “I remember from last time.”  The sergeant nodded.  The head guard walked over and put them into the prisoner’s nose.

 

With breathing restricted to her mouth, the cigar went in easily.  The prisoner was soon coughing and choking to beat the band.  She stood there in all the muck and horror with a cigar in her mouth, not knowing how to smoke, not knowing how to get the smoke out of her lungs.  She stood there as miserable a figure as I had ever seen with her lungs constantly filling with the smoke.  She stood there until the MA’s made the sergeant stop.

 

She stood there with her body already exhausted.  Only the ropes held her up.  The one remedy the human anatomy has to extreme punishment is fainting but the prisoner was even denied that last relief because of the coughing.  Even when the noseplugs were removed, relief did not come.  Instead the torture of the coughing continued as the respiratory system worked to empty the lungs of the smoke.  All the while the stench of the dead predecessor’s remains wafted up and around the post.  The insects started crawling up her legs.

 

It was now time for the main event.  The sergeant had taken station beside his squad.

 

“Firing squad, attention!”

 

“Raise arms!”  Six men raised six rifles.

 

“Ready arms!”  Six rifle butts were planted into six shoulders as six barrels were lowered into the horizontal firing position.

 

“Aim!”  Six laser targeting systems were activated.  I noticed the red dots on the prisoner’s thighs, chest, and shoulders.  The firing squad was going for broken bones, not permanent injury.  It was going to hurt like hell.

 

But for the prisoner’s coughing and the buzz of flies over the human mess at her feet, the field was silent.  She probably felt the slight heat of the laser beams on her skin, so she knew where the bullets would strike.  The ropes held her body fast.  The knowledge of what was coming and the anticipation of it only tortured her mind even more.

 

“Fire!”

 

The body shuddered as the bullets hit it.  Maria’s head rolled and sagged.  The trauma to her body that the bullets had caused had finally made her faint.  The fainting spell lasted for only the briefest of times as the lungs demanded to breath and so the coughing woke her back up.

 

The ropes held her fast to the post while she coughed her remaining strength away.  On the surface it seemed as if nothing had happened.  She stood there against the post, a picture of soft flesh and rope.  But then the guards began to cut away her ropes.  They first cut the rope tying her hands together.  The arms drifted back from behind the post and hung limply at her side.  They cut the ropes around her feet.  Then they cut the ropes above her knees.  No sooner had they been cut than the knees immediately began to buckle.  Only the ropes beneath her now dislocated shoulders held her against the post.  Now they were cut, too.  She fell straight to the ground.  She lay there in the muck, her chest heaving while she coughed up everything she had in her.

 

I couldn’t help but reflect that the dead Communist terrorist whatever was a lucky woman after all.  If there was a God and He did value prayer, then He must know that rarely had such a prayer ever been offered as the one I had witnessed here.  This wasn’t fanaticism, this was caring, caring enough to sacrifice.  Dying is easy; living, now that is hard.