Last Meal on Death's Row

Roosters crowed from somewhere out in the free world. I lifted myself gingerly from the stone slab I'd rested on throughout my final evening and forced my sleep-deprived limbs towards the exterior wall of our dark, stone cell. I raised my cold, shaking hands to remove the makeshift curtain I'd hung on our window before dark, hoping to see one last sunrise. The sky was grey and a storm loomed in the distance but below in the courtyard, I could just make out some fleeting rays of light that breached the clouds and shone down promisingly on the face of a young guard.

"I don't like looking out windows, it fills me with a strange feeling, so I much prefer the indoors', said the slouched old woman beside me.

Do you mind?' I barked back, shooting a look of annoyance at her. 'I don't remember ordering irrelevant statements for breakfast last evening.' I suppose I'm now regarded as discriminating against the poor, sick, and elderly, but that wasn't the cause of my shortness. The prospect of being sent to hell on an empty stomach was a fate worse than hanging for a man with my appetite. When I was a child, we lived on a large estate that housed at any given time about two dozen pigs, which were raised and often prepared for Sunday luncheons. If my father had had the choice we'd have lived on a farm, but laws in our area, imposed by aristocratic neighbours, prohibited such activities. Despite our wealth, my father never avoided manual work, and I admired him greatly for challenging what was expected of men in our class. He would often say that no man could be wise on an empty stomach, but in my present circumstances, those words rang disconcertingly in my ears. Of course, this was some forty years ago, before I became a judge... and before appearing in the local papers, in a time when my only title was William.

'Funny sir. I don't remember ordering anything at all,' croaked the old, filthy prisoner. It was difficult to know whether she was aware of how sarcastic her response was. There was no point in arguing at a time like this, so I humoured her.

'I don't suppose you happen to know what's for breakfast?... They haven't left it to that fat old guard who visited us last night, have they? He'd likely finish it himself before climbing those steps again!'

'Never mind sir, here we let the beetles handle that business,' she quipped without looking up. 'And if anyone can tell the time in a place like this, it's those beetles,' she added emphatically with a deranged smile. It was becoming apparent that these were the ramblings of a lunatic. Suddenly she motioned invitingly with both of her decrepit hands towards the glowing light beneath our cell door and started counting from one. Upon announcing her numbers, a row of fifty or so beetles paraded out from the slender stream of light. I thought this to be some party trick of the old prisoners, playing as a practical joke to make me feel unwell.

'Very clever, but unfortunately, you're not the first woman I've come across to have trained her beetles. I once knew an old librarian who trained them to perform antics of this sort.' She appeared too preoccupied with the beetles to notice what I said. Still, as they arranged themselves in an orderly line before her, her blank expression left her. Her white brow furrowed in the dim light, and her eyes stared at the beetles with intense regret.

'Can't train a beetle sir, one can only wish...,' asserted the old woman, letting out a giggle. Somehow, she appeared childlike, slumped against the wall and eerily giggling over beetles. She must have trained them long ago when she still had some order in her mind, but now it seemed as though the beetles were more lucid than she. I began to pity her.

'It's the fate of all parents eventually to become dependent on their children,' I remarked cheekily, trying to coax her into a conversation about the beetles' peculiar behaviour. They were arranged in front of her like a class of disciplined students. At that moment, she stood up, revealing an emaciated, pale torso covered in wild white hair. Almost glowing in the cold morning light, she slowly turned her face to me, wearing an intense expression of disapproval.

'FOR THE LAST TIME...!' she bellowed with sudden hostility, 'YOU CANNOT TRAIN A BEETLE!'

I flinched just quickly enough not to be covered in her sickly saliva. It was clear that the woman had lost her senses, yet she seemed sufficiently cognisant of my teasing. The light met her face now, and I was shocked to recognize her eyes behind the matted, grey parting of her hair. It was Teagan, who once stood before my court years ago as a peasant girl whom I had summarily convicted and sentenced without trial. I assumed that this was a sick joke arranged by the prosecutors, a punitive ploy to torment me with my own malfeasance. The Teagan I now shared a cell and fate with was not the same as the youth of earlier days. She wore the brutality and bleak austerity of the hellhole I had banished her to, with teeth and lips that were as broken as the riddles they spoke.

'It's breakfast time sir... remember?' said the skeletal old woman, wearing a look of anticipation. 'Fair is fair. Twenty-five for me and twenty-five for you, and if you don't like beetles, you can always eat your words instead,' she continued in a mock-judicial tone, laughing again as she sprawled back down on the cell floor.