Short Story Fiction Contest May 2014 | Page 74

[Malefactor], Executed at Tyburn on… (or such) and tittered about it for days amongst themselves. The Accounts had something for everybody.

“Confessions! Warnings, for the children!” I raised an eyebrow I hoped Mme. Graveau didn’t see. “Repentance! Humility before our Lord! How these men die, hmn? I mean, they hang, that’s how they die, but how they die.” There was not, as far as I ever discerned, a M. Graveau. “What is in their hearts, their phiz, do they have messy pantaloons?” I tried not to let my face betray my disgust, for Mme. Graveau did not mean are they wearing trousers appropriate to the occasion? Luckily, she had been bent toward my ear. But then she straightened. “But you know, hmn? You know what the people like. You write it!” Tousling my hair. Exhausting. And I recalled only once mentioning someone’s messy pantaloons, and that time it was critical to my Account.

I drained my gin, and looked around meaningfully, as if there were somebody else but Mme. Graveau to replenish me. But no, hectoring first, gin later. “But that is what troubles me so.” Leaning in again, closer than before. “I don’t know how you write it. I mean, you write it here, right here in Mme. Graveau’s. I tell everybody that, you know. Every!” Poke. “Body!” Poke. “But how you write it, I don’t know.”

She reared back and pounced on her point. “How you do it without going crazy. See people die horribly, then describe it in detail – and don’t lose your charm and cheerfulness.” Wink. I assured her that on every day but a hanging day, I had a surfeit of both. She agreed, ostentatiously. Her fingertips brushed my shoulder, she agreed so much. Laughing, she took my cup with her to where the gin was. I exhaled.

Mme. Graveau believed that writing about death should have