Love Bird

The block resounded, A gout of blood fountained from the transfixed neck, dousing the crowd and ran bright down the stump's front. Her hands clenched, her spooked legs goosed, and the ample barely contained figure slide off spraying blood across the wooden boards.

 

The crowd's eyes stayed on her dying head as the life drained from her face, dazzled by her sensual bloodied lips, their eyes indulged every twitch, each finger's twists. Gradually Madame de Villar's oval face lost its expression of pain, her mouth opened slightly as her jaw muscled relaxed, as her tongue hang out and unrolled upon the dirtied boards. Her bloodied eyes lost focus as her pupils slowly dilated...As she lost control of face, her inner muscles, her body's last fibers of dignity as her bladder relaxed beneath her silk.

Then, patiently waiting until the woman's dying heart finished pumping, the headsman's aides smothered a sponge over her pulpy neck and wiped her running hips. A rainproof tarp fell over the bloody remains and the valets placed the supple corpse in a gravedigger's cart. A stranger threw two pistoles at the executioner, a few crowns to the other valets of the scaffold, and a few silvers at the gravedigger.

The people sighed...The last traitor was taken; the traitors finished. The crowd prayed then scattered, repeating halfhearted recountings and compared notes with each other. It had been...a most impressionable sight.