The prison garden

During my kidnapping, I was held prisoner in a cell that was just below this garden. Each day, through the door, my jailers threatened me with the most horrible deaths. I think there were five of them, but I never saw them. I could only hear them moving around behind the door. My only expedient to try and figure out who they were was to blend in with whatever they might be up to. I would listen to the sound of their footsteps in the corridor and would start to walk the way they did. On a cardboard box lying there in the back of my cell, I recorded the way each of my kidnappers walked. By holding it against my stomach, I contrived to get inside their gait.
Although this kidnapping was a long time ago now, whenever too much agonising wells up in me, I come to this garden with my box and I place my steps in the steps of each of my kidnappers to unburden myself of everything they put me through.
I made sure to put a dead bird in the box in case someone asked me what was inside.

My blood will spatter on you. And you will place your hands over your faces to protect yourselves. And there will be bloodstains on your fingers. All except the little finger. You will wash your hands but all day long you will be unable to take your eyes off your fingers. And you will take a fancy to the little finger. The little finger spared from being tarnished. And you will wonder why it is so small and the others so big. And you will want to cut off the big ones. But you will think of me. You will be afraid that by cutting them off, the blood might spurt onto the dear little pinkie. So then you will try to stretch the little finger for it to be able to protect itself. And this will hurt, and the pain will hurt the whole hand. And still it will not grow, and you will pull even harder, and the pain will extend to the whole body. Then the pain will leave you behind, and yet you will carry on feeling crushed down by it.

You will come en masse. You wouldn't miss my last facial expression for all the world. You will see the noose being tied around me. You will see me drop. The rope twines will send me spinning. You will be afraid to lose sight of my face for a moment. You will be in such a hurry to miss nothing that you will turn around the gallows in time with the rope, you will do one turn, then two turns, three turns, four turns. You will be running around the gallows. Then the rope will finally stop turning in one direction, and start unwinding in the other. You will accompany this movement. And you will run round one turn, two turns, three turns. You won't even need to carry on looking in my direction; you will be content to watch your own expression; you will be content to watch with your faces strained crimson, with your necks stretched out in your desire to see me.

You will remember my name and utter it only as an insult. You will vomit my name in your enemy's face, your heads no more than a few inches apart. You will splutter out my name. Even when your throats are too swollen to pronounce my name, you will spit it in each other’s faces. Your saliva will drip down each other’s cheeks and arms. It will drench you with the insult of my name. You will be caught in the flood of my name. But you too will suffer from becoming dried up inside. You will take me back again from each other’s bodies, lick each other to bring me back. I shall run down your throats again.

I shall remain among you. Already, you see me disappear amid the flames, but I shall stay on. Soon I shall be just a heap of ash, and you will stand open-mouthed in front of the debris; and the wind now stirring up the embers will shortly carry up my ashes in the air; my cloud of ashes will waft over to you and deposit particles in your gaping mouths.
My ashes will snuggle up deep in your throats. At first you won't feel a thing, but I shall be there all right. You will go off and drink to my health. You will open a bottle of good wine. But the wine won't taste quite right. As you are drinking the first glass, you will already be thinking about the second which hopefully will taste as it should. By the time you come to the second glass, you will already be in the memory of the third. But the memory will never come back. And so you will drink and drink … but never getting the taste back… Snuggled up down your throats, I shall be the one to taste your wine.
So you will live in hope that the wine you are quaffing goes down ever more quickly; that time passes more quickly, to be already in the next glass, and time will speed up so much that even as I speak you will already have reached the hour of your death.

Tu retiendras mon nom et ne le prononcera plus que comme injure. Tu éructeras mon nom à la figure de ton ennemi. Vos têtes ne seront plus qu’à quelques centimètres l’une de l’autre. Vous vous postillonnerez mon nom. Et quand bien même vos gorges seraient trop enflammée pour pouvoir encore prononcer mon nom, vous vous le cracherez à la figure. Votre salive dégoulinera sur les joues, sur les bras de l’autre. Elle vous noiera de l’injure de mon nom. Vous serez pris dans le flot de mon nom. Mais vous souffrirez aussi de vous être desséchés de l’intérieur. Vous me reprendrez sur le corps de l’autre, vous vous lècherez mutuellement pour me reprendre. Je coulerai à nouveau dans vos gorges.