A Place To Bloom

Consequences

The Sling, they called it. It was four heavy wooden posts tucked away at the end of the barracks and beside the north wall, each hosting an iron shackle connected to a chain with a crank, two for your hands and two for your feet. What you do is you hang there, face-down and naked until they decide you don't need to anymore.

The pain starts in your wrists, with the shackles digging into your skin and rubbing against your bones. You have three options. You can try to twist your wrist in some unnatural angle so that it digs into a different bone, you can pull hard with all your strength to bring your arms inward—this doesn't help your wrists but it does make it easier to breathe, or you can give up and become one with the pain. As the hours wear you down, you find yourself cycling through all three options.

You can't tell if it's been thirty seconds or thirty hours, and you notice the same pain in your ankles. You have the same iron thing pressing into your shin while the other end digs hard at your heel, and you feel like you're on the verge of being ripped apart. Half the muscles in your legs are stretched beyond capacity while the other half wish they could stretch but can't.

Then some time later, the strain begins. You can't relax. Your shoulders strain from shifting what tiny fraction of movement the chains allow in desperate hope for some scrap of comfort, and exhaustion takes its toll. You feel it in your back, in your hips, in your arms, everywhere. Keep tugging, keep stressing, hoping that the sliver of respite you can afford your tortured wrists and ankles is worth what rapidly depleting energy you have left.

The most sore of all is your neck. Try to hold your head up, and the sharp pain of muscles being overworked shoots throughout your body. Let your head fall, and you get dizzy from the blood rush.

I tried to focus on gratitude; I hadn't gotten my liver ripped out yet.

It didn't help that I hadn't eaten since breakfast some twelve hours earlier.

The sound of men laughing around the corner rose above the crickets and cut through the darkness. I could see nothing but the faint light of an oil lamp around the corner casting drops of yellow onto the grass that had crept around the corner. Then, the laughing stopped.

Centuries later, the chatter of more men around the corner, voices I didn't recognize then went off to bed.

I'd probably hung there all of ten minutes for all I knew.

No, it must have been hours.

Maybe.

I heard footfalls in the grass. I had my head low, trying to give my neck a break, but the footfalls grew louder as someone approached me.

Might have been one of Ahmi's friends coming for an easy snack. Maybe if it ate one arm, my other arm could get a rest.

I refused to look up. Not that I'd have been able to see who it was for the darkness, but I was busy. I was counting how long it took to get high off the blood rush to my head.

I heard someone sit down in the grass and felt the sudden jerk in my right arm as they leaned against the post. Then I heard a yawn, followed by a sip from a drink.

I yanked my shoulders forward to free up enough breath to speak. "I lost count."

"What were you counting?" Commander's deep baritone and deliberate cadence rose above the crickets to fill the night. I could smell the alcohol on his breath from several feet away.

I tried to grasp the question but it slipped from me. "I don't remember."

I heard a chuckle followed by another sipping noise. I could scarcely see anything for the darkness, and the strain in my chest continued.