A Hanging

Author Thommy Come Lately had a very interesting take on the latest flash fiction prompt.

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A hush fell over the crowd. Nearly three hundred souls stood on the muddy grass of the city park, yet not a man spoke. All knew; the time had come. 

Atop a bare wooden platform stood three men. The platform rose ten feet into the air, making the men visible to everyone in attendance. Each man was dressed in black. The pastor in his frock, the executioner in his hood, and the condemned in disheveled prison clothes with burlap over his head. A noose was cinched tight around the condemned man’s neck. 

The pastor had just finished conducting the crowd in a solemn singing of “Amazing Grace” and the hymn’s conclusion had led to the hush that now fell. It was time. The pastor turned aside and the executioner stepped forward to grasp the wooden lever attached to the trap door beneath the condemned man’s feet. A ripple of anticipation spread through the crowd as the townsfolk braced themselves. Several women covered the eyes of their children.

On the white balcony of the county courthouse, the district judge leaned forward in his chair. Our judge felt it his duty to personally witness each death he ordered. The townsfolk agreed with and were comforted by this noble sentiment. They knew they had a good judge. 

Unseen beside the good judge was an angelic spirit. At the spiritual level, this angelic being emitted a bright light that shone out from the courthouse and over the spiritually darkened park like a lighthouse on a cold winter night. The angel was all starched white. He believed in the same sense of justice as the judge. 

Beneath the balcony, spiritual fog emanating from the crowd quickly enveloped the pure light of the angel in a chaotic swirl of warfare. Everywhere was an admixture of the darkest inky black and the purest light of heaven in constant conflict. The battle lines between the kingdoms of light and darkness were constantly shifting in the multidimensional war. (A small child’s bright light of hope was assaulted by the darkness of fear, pride, and vanity as she perched on her mother’s shoulders to see the hanging.) 

Back on the physical level, the executioner pulled the wooden lever and the condemned man plunged through the trap door. 

As the man dropped through the air the crowd listened breathlessly to hear his neck snap. It did not snap. The condemned man hit the bottom of the rope and his body twirled in the air, but his vertebrae held fast. The force of the drop knocked the wind out of his lungs and the man quickly began to choke as the noose cut into his airway. His mouth could be seen through the burlap bag as it gaped wide and sucked at the dirty sackcloth. 

Spiritually, something had shaken loose inside the condemned man. As he fell through the platform, the darkness the man had carried for over a decade had fallen with him. But when his weight hit the bottom of the rope, many unclean spirits slid through his body and dripped out onto the ground below his dangling feet. 

Physically, the condemned man had been emotionally numb as he stood on the platform with the noose around his neck. But after he fell, the man felt strangely clear-headed gasping for his last breath. A peace came over him. He felt none of the panic or anger that had filled his last days. 

No, instead the condemned man felt strangely calm as he swung on a rope for the last desperate seconds of his life. The jolt at the bottom of that rope had ended 27 years of darkness and flung a cumulative host of spiritual darkness down into the mud below. 

The man was face to face with death, and he instantly accepted his fate. A spiritual light began to shine above the man as he thought, “I’m dying—and that’s good. I deserve this.” 

The muscles of his neck struggled against the rope and his last attempt at a gasp for air was a shuddering failure. The man’s shoulders collapsed and his head tilted back to hang staring up into darkness—his eyes bulging from the pressure. 

In the spirit, a bright light broke through the clouds and poured down onto the dying man. “Jesus,” the man thought in his heart and mind, “Will you forgive me? I beg you.” 

With that, the man lost consciousness. The wretched darkness that had been his lay below his feet in a puddle, but the light that shone upon him from above had grown stronger and now angelic forms began to spiral down the beam of light and to surround the man hanging. 

As the man’s heart beat one final time, the spiritual chaos of the crowd was suddenly stilled. The clash of light and dark came to a halt. Hordes of spirits looked up in surprise as a weak and shriveled human soul was separated from the hanging human body and carried upwards in the arms of many angels. The bright light followed the soul up into the clouds and went out, leaving the crowd below much the same as had been before.