The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
‘Untitled’ by Alejandro Bastidas
“Where were you … the day God quit?” Lobo asks me on our way to the gallows.
I squint at the charcoal clouds shifting across that empty realm where no one lives, and I smile, without any joy, at my cellmate’s question. Odd of him to ask. Not everyone likes to talk about The Day when so many things ended and many more began.
“I was in the first place I ever called a home,” I answer, the bitter aftertaste of remembrance crawling up my throat. “About to propose to my boyfriend until he tried to ask God personally why He quit.”
“What do you mean?”
“He jumped right off the window.”
“Jesus… did he die?”
“I’m not sure.”
“So you left him there?”
“No. I stopped him from jumping well enough, but only rescued this empty creature with nothing to live for. Might as well have died splattered on the ground with the birds.”
“Nasty business, that bird thing,” Lobo says. “But rejoice, my friend! For that was God’s plan all along.”
I can’t stop myself from laughing at the comment, despite how grim and false it may be. For some people the notion might seem comforting — not to us. Not to men about to hang for the truth. To us, funnier words could never be spoken. Lobo’s howling laughter joins mine. It’s the best we can do to distract ourselves from our poisoned past.
The Masked Cardinals nudge us forward with their iron batons. I don’t understand the point of threatening men who are about to die, but my guess is that they can’t help it. Give an angry man a weapon, then bathe him in a Holy Cause so all the filth he carries inside is replaced by glimmering nobility, and he will not hesitate to hurt another human being. The beatings are justified. Making a spectacle out of a mass hanging is also justified. To them, we are not people. Just meat. Meat that needs to be disposed of. So why the hanging? Why delight themselves with our deaths?
The smiths that forged their iron masks shouldn’t have bothered making holes for the eyes. Blind men have no use for them. Their eyes are healthy, yes, but rendered useless by the maniacal obsession of conjuring the Devil inside every shadow, inside the bodies of everyone they don’t agree with, and not to find the truth they’ve been looking for since The Day. Countless theories surfaced after the gods left us, and years later, I realized it was never about one individual answer. But one of the main causes is right here, surrounding Lobo and I, around the blind cardinals. I close my eyes and use that beautiful and dangerous tool of creation that people call imagination, great for filling in every existential gap we might stumble upon, and imagine how I must look like from afar.
“At least this isn’t a bad place to die in, eh?” Lobo says.
I couldn’t agree more. Somewhere in the crowd in front of me, at the very top of the maroon amphitheater saddling the coast of Jones Beach, where the Atlantic Ocean flows into infinity and boasts of its fullness at the empty sky, there is someone smiling at the promise of my execution. Actually, there’s 15,000 people from all over the world who reserved an entire weekend in their hectic schedules to witness the hanging of other human beings. This shows me we haven’t progressed much. The passive onlookers who hide their shame behind iron masks have the twisted privilege of studying our faces as they are showcased in gigantic screens flanking the stage. Cameras are pointed down at us while beams of iridescent light slice through our bodies. There was a time when musicians came alive in this stage and strangers evolved past their differences to become one great family under the spell of music, captivated by the simplicity of existing in the present, rousing the ocean’s spirit into a gracious dance. And I know that because this isn’t my first time in Jones Beach.
I smile at the memories, my only meaningful possessions, while the other prisoners halt by their respective nooses.
Today there are thirty people whose necks will be violently elongated by dusty ropes, our eyes will pop out from our sockets after assuming a striking shade of Titian red, one so rich that will devour our vision and deny us the white light that announces the afterlife, that distant possibility disguised as a promise, of something better and beautiful. But our death, like our lives, will be covered in red. At least that’s what Oliver would have said. He’d describe the scene as a mannerist painting using that velvet voice of his, perpetually enchanted, a true romantic convinced that life always imitates art. And perhaps today he would be right.
I choose to replace my final thoughts with Oliver’s, as a way to resurrect him and seek comfort in his phantasmal company, because no matter how much I have trained myself to greet the grim reaper with a kiss on the lips, I don’t want to go through it alone.
It would be more humane of the Cardinals to hire a firing squad to do the honors, or have them season our last meals with silent poisons, but since the concept of humanity has been lost for centuries, it is no surprise that these faithful butchers have chosen to compress our carotid arteries so our brains swell like morbid balloons full of red pulp plugging the top of our spinal column. We won’t be given the courtesy of the long drops that would make our deaths instant and painless. I know this should make me panic, or pray to the almighty forces that forfeited heaven, regard my afterlife or the lack of it with some greater importance, or struggle against the iron chains binding my wrists, but I am not afraid of death or the great afterthat is supposed to come after it. I am not afraid of nothingness either. A dreamless sleep devoid of sensations or memories is just another way to describe peace.
I will not let them take that away from me.
Nobody here is more afraid than the Masked Cardinals themselves. Truth is their greatest enemy. One they fight with the vile intolerance of fanatics, spawn of misinformation, forever bound to the downward spiral of our inventive and primitive species. Quiet is their guilt. But I see it, clear through the iron covering their faces, just as they see my serenity through the big screens flashing around me like a halo.
“Just out of curiosity, where do you think we’re going?” Lobo asks me. “Hell?”
“I like to think otherwise,” I say. “I’ve heard too many people tell Oliver and I that we were going to Hell before.”
“It is a possibility, you know? Not because of who you loved, but because of all the things that led you here to this theater. The Voices confirmed the existence of a Heaven, so naturally, there must be an equivalent to Hell. Now, who goes where, I don’t know. Might turn into a Pink at the Ghostfalls, or meet the goat man with his fork in the pits of Hell, but at least this isn’t a bad place to die in.”
“No it’s not,” I tell him. “They called it Northwell Health Theater years ago.”
“Really? And what were you doing in the middle of some forsaken lump of land under Long Island?”
“Concert. Oliver invited me.”
“I’ve never been to a concert. Too many germs, you know? But was it good? Who did you see?”
“Lana Del Rey. She stood right here on this stage, wearing a gorgeous white dress that swayed in synch with her hair, singing her soul out to a crowd of unstable gays calling her Mom.”
“I think know her. My cousin Ermenegilda Altagracia was up north in that state that no one gives a shit about… What’s it called?”
“Idaho? Wyoming?”
“Yes! Wyoming. Right, so she told me that The Voice in Wyoming sounded just like that Lana person, but it wasn’t a scream, more like a mother telling you she’s disappointed of your life choices. She couldn’t understand the words, though. The Voice spoke in Shoshoni first. I had to research that for my book The Two-Hundred Voices in the Americas.And then my other cousin, Ermenegildo Cristobal Lorenzo, who was in Greenland at the time, said it sounded like an angry chain-smoker about to have a stroke. Old Norse, that one.”
“And what did you hear? Where were you?” I asked him as a Cardinal fixed the noose around my throat, the thick knot lashing at my chin with its loose threads while the fragrance of grime and skeletons flooded my nostrils.
“I was with a pack of high school kids eating breakfast. Arepa e’ huevo, periquitos, and some tintico. The good stuff. I used to be a tour guide back then and we were close to this lagoon full of bioluminescent plankton, so spectacular at night that it made me question how nature created something so beautiful but also something so foul as a human being. Such a strange duality, eh? Point is, next morning The Voice screamed ¡A la mierda, renuncio!And for a second, no one moved or blinked. Then the craziest thing happened. I’ve seen it all, my friend, you know this. But seconds later, as if through some telepathic nationwide agreement, everyone quit their jobs. I threw my cap at one of the kids and quit. The cooks, the servers, the teachers, the drivers, everyonequit. My cousin Ermenegildo Ruben Santiago called me later that day to tell me everyone in Colombia quit their jobs. Government officials never worked anyway so they declared it a national holiday and people started drinking like there would be no tomorrow,” Lobo said and released a long sigh. “But my Abuela Eremenegilda was very religious and would spend half of her days praying the Rosary for the whole barrio, so when God told everyone he was tired of our bullshit, the weight of her faith came crashing down on her she had a stroke.”
“Sorry about your grandma,” I say. “And Colombia sounds lovely, though. England was a miserable shit show afterwards. No parties.”
“Well, yeah, it’s good to remember where you come from. Colombia was a beautiful country before it was colonized—again.”
“So I heard. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine, all thirty of my cousins made it out. But, as I was telling you, when everyone recovered from the biblical drunkenness of The Day, and people realized they’d been complete idiots, the country collapsed. That’s why the United Believer Army colonized it so easily. So I left before everyone started arguing about which was the true voice of God and all that.”
“And that path, like mine, led you here.”
“Claro que sí. For the truth.”
