The Death Of Dickie.

Dickie screamed.

The view before him was beautiful: wild luscious grass spanned as far as could be seen, a crisp sky reflected down on him with only a splattering of clouds.  Nature was in its abundance.

Dickie's scream cracked as it reached its peak.  The nail scratched past his bone and burrowed into the wood behind it.

"Warm butter, my flesh is like warm butter.  After all those years walking around feeling so...so...indestructable.  Now, I finally know how frail I have always been."

The hammer struck again and the nail was secured.

"Death, disease, terror, suffering; all the things I thought I at least knew a little about.  How further from the reality could I have been?"

The blurred figure that was before him shifted.  The echoes of his movements faded behind him.

This time Dickie barely felt the tip of the nail as it pierced his skin.  That familiar trickle of blood rolled down past his wrist and into the palm of his hand.

He watched the hammers rise above him - he knew there was only one hammer but the reality and unreality was hard to distinguish now - and waited for it to fall.

The sun beat down on his face and the wind teased his hair.  The figure stood posed over him, silhouetted by the sun.  The green of the land and the blue of the sky merged.  Then the hammer fell.

Dickie screamed.  The scream was hoarse and choked out long before the last.  Then the pain seemed to regress slightly.  Dickie was thankful for that moments tranquility.  Then a third nail sliced through his flesh between the bones in his ankle.  Dickie screamed in silence as the pain tore through him.  This time he had not felt the prick of the nail.

Dickie was unaware of the groans that escaped his lips. The green of the fields and the blue of the sky had been replaced by a sloppy brown texture that consumed his vision,  only to be broken by the occasional movement by the men that swam around him.  The pain came and went like waves crashing on a sandy beach.  Dickie felt cold and alone as he approached his finale.  Then the pain sliced through him as surely as that final nail sliced through his flesh.  Dickie King was now firmly nailed to the cross.

Dickie's eyes rolled from one side to the next.  The men that worked around him were nothing but distant phantoms; they could have been the devil's minions or Jesus's disciples.  Dickie no longer cared.  All he wanted was and end to the suffering.

The phantoms swirled and bustled around him.  They slipped the rope, unknown to Dickie, around the cross, they tied it firm, they completed their deed.  Then they vanished.

Dickie's breath was shallow.  His heart rate the slightest patter.  Slowly, he was slipping away.

No scream erupted from his mouth this time, only spit and blood, as the nails ground against his bones.  The cross was rising.  The will of God was lifting was cross up-wards.  Gradually, Dickie's weight was being held by those confounded nails.

As Dickie continued to rise vertical, the sun crept into his murky vision.  In the world of pain, and phantoms, and gods, that Dickie knew, the sun was the only thing that unburdened him of his sins.

Dickie smiled as his weight continued to pull him further onto the nails.  He smiled as the phantoms strained, and groaned, and moaned, as they pulled on the ropes to raise the cross higher.  The pain he knew was unbearable but the smile that emerged was genuine.  Then darkness descended over the sun and Dickie King knew no more.


                                                                                                    Simon Veasey

                                                                                                    28/02/2008