The Executioner's Wall

By Rick Hartford

If Walls Could Talk.

Would you listen?

Then know this.

I am standing in the middle of a village square right down the street from the courthouse in central Mexico.

In front of me children play, old women sweep the sidewalk across the way, vendors sell street tacos and a single clown mimes his way down the street completely ignored by everybody.

Lovers hold hands, con men hold their weighted dice, a fat man holds his water and the Madonna standing in front of the Catholic Church holds the weight of humanity in her cupped hands.

You might think that as a vista for a wall it’s not too bad, considering I could be in a dark alley being urinated on by the occasional stew bum.

But I am not an ordinary wall.

I am the executioner’s wall.

I am shame and pain and remorse.

I am filled with pock marks and my face is badly chipped. I am poisoned by lead.

I have seen fear and begging.

There is a beautiful yellow wall across the way, next to the flower shop. She has a new coat of paint put on each year and someone has hand painted flowers and parrots and hummingbirds and tropical trees on her.

She is beautiful and I love her. I call out to her early each day, hoping to win her favor. But she looks away.

I know that she thinks I am ugly, and complicit somehow, as if I was responsible for the sinful acts which I stand as witness.

I know that I am ugly.

Punctures like icepick acne, black splotches of old blood.

Now I can see the squad of soldiers march down to me from the town jail, a captain in the lead prodding a lurching prisoner with his sword.

I am sick as they tie his hands to the steel rings they have pounded into my body and for a moment the prisoner and I have become one, both of us covered in a thick sheen of sweat and both knowing that the end is at hand.

The captain fits a white kerchief over the prisoner’s eyes. He lights up a last cigarette and places it between the doomed man’s lips.

He asks the prisoner if he has a final word to say.

Most of the time they do not. Some times they can only pray.

Sometimes they tell the captain that they will see him in Hell.

The captain’s sorrowful face shows that he knows this is true. He is presided in many executions. Each one kills a piece of his soul.

Each trip to the wall brings him one step closer to his own grave.

The soldiers who pull their triggers fool themselves believing they do not have the bullet which will pierce the prisoner’s heart. But they are all tainted.

Time passes and I grow old and grey and the firing squad drifts away into the past.

I am a curiosity now.

Tourists lean up against me for photographs.

They are smiling.

The night arrives and every night is the same. I sleep fitfully, forever frozen, wishing for once someone would run their hand slowly down my face, a caress, a loving touch by a beautiful woman. And yet I see that my dream has come true! I have never seen her before. She touches her forehead to my cool face and says a prayer.

I soon learn that the woman has bought the property where I stand. I believe that I will be made whole, my scars covered over with a bright coat of paint. Blue, like the summer sky above me.

But it is not to be.

A crane with a wrecking ball arrives early the next morning. The driver gets out of his cab and looks at me, finishing his smoke and crushing it under his boot. Then he starts his engine.

This will be a new beginning, I tell myself.

I will be released from my eternal sadness.

Dust to dust.