Esma did not sleep a wink on her final night. The mattress in the corner of her cell was thin and hard, but her night would have been no easier on a mattress fit for a sultan. As a communist, of course, she did not believe in sultans or their rights to be treated any better than any ordinary Turk. She knew that her hanging was scheduled for 10am the next morning, but her cell, deep in the bowels of Ankara Central Prison, had neither clock nor natural light. Lights out in the prison was 10pm and, although the lights never went out for her – she was continuously monitored by CCTV to ensure that she did not attempt to anticipate the law – she had seen the dimming of the lights in the corridor. Since then, however, she had had no way of marking time, so she had no idea whether her executioner would arrive at any moment, or whether she had many agonising hours of waiting still to endure.
She tried to show her undiminished dedication to communism by singing revolutionary songs at the top of her voice – first the Internationale, then the anthem of the Turkish Communist Party. She had imagined – and rather relished – the notion that the guards would charge into her cell, manhandling her against the wall or slapping her face; but instead they simply ignored her. She quickly tired of her defiant performance and she felt her voice becoming hoarse. She sat cross-legged on the mattress, head bowed in her bands and fingers to her temples. She rocked back and forth, tearfully humming the songs she had attempted to declaim. When she tired of this, too, she paced back and forth along the length of her cell, wondering incessantly how many others had spent their final nights in this very cell, how they had passed the time, and how they had died the following day...did they beg?...scream?...Did they twitch?...kick?...Did they wet themselves?...Their ghosts seemed to inhabit the walls, screaming and moaning. How much longer, she thought, must she wait? As time progressed unmeasured, she also began to wonder whether her boyfriend Ahmed, sentenced alongside her, had been her immediate predecessor in the cell, or perhaps whether he would be next. Or perhaps, at that very moment, he was pacing up and down a different death cell, in a different prison, wondering desperately about his beloved Esma...
Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, two figures came down the corridor – a male guard and his female companion. “Good morning, Esma,” said the man.
“So it is morning, then?” Esma replied, in a voice combining fatalism and fear.
“You have about an hour,” the man replied kindly. “If you like, Aysu can take you to the bathroom so you can wash a bit and do your hair. Your mother sent the dress you asked for.”
The mention of her mother brought tears to her eyes. She answered, her voice cracking with emotion, “Thank you: I'd like that very much. Is this going to get you into trouble?”
Aysu answered maternally: “No, don't worry. It's not strictly allowed, but the...” she stopped, searching for another word, then, realizing that no such word existed, continued, “He doesn't mind.”
They walked her slowly to the bathroom, where Esma splashed cold water over her face, before removing her shapeless prison pyjamas. Aysu handed her one of her favourite red dresses, which she had always worn at rallies and public speeches. Finally, she handed her a comb. Esma carefully combed the knots out of her long black hair as best she could before winding it into braids, which she secured with hairbands, and draping one braid over each shoulder. She had had no access to a mirror for a week, but, looking at her reflection in the (no-doubt shatterproof) one here, she thought defiantly “I still look like Esma Baykara.” She briefly practised the stare she would give the executioners, then turned away, ashamed of her vanity at such a time. Knowing the likely upshot of failing to do so, she tried to empty her bladder and bowels but, in full view of Aysu, whom she knew would not risk leaving the room, she could barely produce a thing. She looked up at Aysu with disappointment:
“It doesn't matter,” Aysu said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “We'd better get you back to your cell.” Esma nodded before standing, smoothing down her dress and walking, the two guards on either side, back down the corridor.
She sat on the edge of the stool in the opposite corner of the cell from the mattress, tapping her right foot rapidly and drumming her fingers on her knees. Barely five minutes had elapsed when two men she did not recognise entered in black suits. The first was clean shaven, short haired and had a rather severe expression. He held the door for the second man: older, bearded and with a more world-weary, softer countenance. Esma realised immediately that these men were, respectively, the executioner's assistant and her executioner himself. What she could not have known was that the latter man had a daughter about her age, who cared little for politics, instead being obsessed with hair and make up and men; and that, as he stared her up and down, he did not see the seditious traitor that the judge had seen, but a young woman, who could have had a promising, lucrative career as a lawyer ahead of her, but who believed in a cause so strongly that she was willing to sacrifice her life for it. If only she hadn't chosen such a subversive cause, he thought to himself. He looked at the athletic young figure that would soon house a dead body as she fixed him with an unblinking, intelligent gaze that seemed to combine wistful sadness with defiant determination, and the bright red dress that adorned it – the symbolism was obvious. He was sure he should have seen unrepentant sedition: instead, he saw unwavering courage.
Banishing such thoughts to the back of his mind, he waited for his colleague to attach around each ankle the two cuffs of a leg iron – long enough to allow her to walk unaided; short enough to ensure she would be easily recaptured if she panicked and tried to bolt. He nodded at the prison-issue plastic moccasins by her bed: “Put those on,” he said, as sternly as he could manage. When she had done so, he said “Follow me please”. He turned away, leading her down the corridor at a pace he knew her restrained feet would be able to maintain, with his assistant following behind her. To Esma, concerned that she might faint, the corridor seemed endless, and she wished he would speed up. The three continued on past the main entrance of the corridor into a section she had not been in before. As she walked, Esma felt her arms being gently lifted from her sides and placed behind her back, where they were bound with rough hemp cord. Instinctively, she could not face looking at what was happening, instead keeping her eyes forward.
After what seemed to Esma like an age, but was in fact less than thirty seconds, they arrived at a set of double doors at the end of the corridor. The executioner turned, nodded to his assistant, and flung the doors wide. Directly in front of her, Esma saw the double-leaved trap, the lever, and, at the level of her head, the noose, with the carefully calculated and measured spare rope tied into a bundle just above: all the hideous apparatus of death. In her mind's eye, she had imagined that she would have to climb stairs to the gallows, but here, barely six steps from where she now stood, marked with a giant X painted onto the floor, was the last place she would ever stand. For the first time, she actually lost her balance. The assistant, well accustomed to this reaction, grabbed her biceps and lifted her pinioned arms, providing the support against gravity of which her legs had proved temporarily incapable. She inhaled deeply and regained her balance.
As soon as she had done so, she felt the assistant pushing her forward sharply until her feet were directly positioned on the X. Her vision suddenly turned black, and almost immediately she realised that a blindfold had been slipped over her eyes. She felt it being made tight, although not painfully so, and fastened securely behind her head. She knew the touch of the material against her skin...pleasant even. It was silk...why would they use a silk blindfold? With the speed of a well-practised professional, the executioner slid the noose over her head. As the rope slid past her nose, she smelled hemp, well-oiled rope...and something else that she found strangely relaxing...arousing even. It was she aroma of her boyfriend's sweat! Her arousal dissipated as the implications hit her like a thunderbolt: the man with whom she had hoped to spend the rest of her life had very recently been hanging dead at the end of the very rope that would soon snap her own neck like a twig.
With similar practised fluency, the hangman slid the noose into position, with the thick steel ring directly below her left ear, and tightened it until it sat flush with the soft skin of her neck. Esma had imagined that the rough hemp would chafe, but the inside of the rope had been carefully lined with soft leather to ensure that, while her spinal column would be ruptured catastrophically, her neck would show as little external damage as possible. Esma found its soft caress unnervingly pleasant.
The executioner had always taught students to prepare and drop prisoners as quickly as possible, but, for a few seconds for which he was later to reproach himself, he found himself spellbound by the image of the strong, vigorous woman standing before him blindfolded, pinioned and noosed, who with one push of the lever in front of him he would transform into a dangling heap of dark skin and red dress. Meanwhile Esma stood trembling on the trap. The tight, sweaty touch of the leather-lined rope against her skin, like a python poised to strike, and the knowledge that every precious breath might be her last, made her aware of her own, rapid breathing as she had never been before. This gentle but firm cling of the leather combined with the silky smoothness of the blindfold, the rough grip of the hemp cord against her wrists and the icy touch of the hard steel ring, pulsating in unison with her carotid artery, into an overwhelming sensory experience that sent shivers down her spine and made every hair of her body stand on end.
Suddenly, a vision entered her head uninvited of Seda Selek announcing on the evening news that “another subversive, Esma Baykara, was executed today at Ankara Central Prison”. Almost immediately she heard a rough, booming sound as the floor vanished beneath her feet. She felt a falling sensation in her stomach as she fell and heard a rapid, intermittent whooshing sound, familiar to the executioner, but not to Esma, as the noise of the bundle of rope being pulled apart kink by kink. After barely a second, the whooshing ceased as the rope reached its full length. Esma's neck felt a savage sideways blow as her head was thrown to the right, and she heard the deafening, gunshot-like crack of her cervical vertebrae being buckled and crushed. She felt an unbelievable, sharp pain in the back of the head, as though a hot poker were being thrust in to her brain. Her right cheek registered a heavy blow from striking her shoulder, while her shoulder felt...nothing at all.
Almost instantaneously, her body rebounded from the shock wave. Her head snapped back to sit momentarily almost vertical, and her braids jumped up from her shoulders. Her slender legs bounced up behind her almost to the level of her buttocks, and her arms bounced up behind her. Almost immediately, however, her legs once again fell limp, and her head flopped back down into the position it was never again to leave – hanging at an impossible angle just in front of her right shoulder. Her moccasins were swept from her feet, one landing with a dull thud on the linoleum floor, while the other made a loud clang as it fell into a metal bucket strategically placed beneath the trap. Her entire body hung limply in space.
Esma's first thought, as she felt her head hit her shoulder, was that she must have been decapitated by the drop. Soon, however, as she realized that she fell no further, the truth, somehow more terrible, dawned on her: her head was still physically attached to her body, but, with her spinal column completely severed, she could neither sense nor control it. Her fading brain cried out for oxygen; she could not tell her lungs even to attempt to draw breath. She felt a drop of saliva escape from her mouth and run slowly down her cheek; she could not even try to brush it away. As the ultimate unconsciousness overtook her, she heard a faint clattering of metal underneath her, but had no mental capacity left to wonder what it was.
After her body had hung limp for a few seconds, a reflexive spasm ran through it – her arms and legs jerking upwards in unison as though she had been given an electric shock. Two or three seconds later, the same spasm struck again. Finally, her right leg curled up underneath her, dragging the left leg with it. Her legs remained frozen like this for several seconds, as though making a final, desperate bid for life, before falling back limp. Her right foot, however, continued to twitch for about sixty seconds.
As her body fell limp, her bladder released, soaking her red dress and sending a stream of fluid dribbling down the inside of her right leg. Some ran from the ankle cuff down the leg iron and splashed into the bucket, while the rest flowed over the bare toes of her twitching foot, landing almost silently on the linoleum floor. A few seconds later, her bowels also emptied, the contents splashing into the fluid in the bucket below.
The prison doctor, who had been waiting beneath the trap and was now climbing onto a stool beneath Esma's hanging body, wrinkled his nose. “Ugh! You guys really have to start using diapers,” he said, looking up through the trap at the executioner and his assistant.
“Hmm,” the executioner murmured, “I just can't face the thought of making someone walk to their death dressed like a giant baby.”
“That's very humanitarian of you,” the doctor replied wryly, “But you're not the one who occasionally gets pissed on.” He unfastened the top three buttons of her dress, opened it slightly and placed the stethoscope against her chest wall.
“Gone?” the executioner asked.
“Not even close,” the doctor said. “This one's young and fit, I reckon her heart will go on for a while. Do you want to go and get some coffee?”
“I thought you were supposed to stay in the room until cardiac arrest!” said with mock-outrage, raising one eyebrow.
The doctor reached up and removed Esma's blindfold, leaning sideways to stare directly into her hanging face, with its blank, staring eyes and half-open, drooling mouth: “I don't think she's going to run away very far,” he deadpanned.
“All right, come on. Let's give the girl some privacy. I'm buying,” he said. The hangman and his assistant left through the same doorway that, less than three minutes previously, the body now hanging limp in the pit had entered under its own power, while the doctor exited through the door in the pit.
Esma remained, however, hanging in the darkened pit alone and unobserved, like a broken-stringed marionette abandoned in an empty theatre after the show has ended. The only sounds punctuating the silence of the execution chamber were an occasional drip as another droplet fell into the bucket from her reaching, bare feet or the hem of her sodden dress, and a gentle creaking of the rope as her body swayed slightly and wheeled half-round and back. As her head hung limply to the right, the left braid of her hair draped itself across the exposed decolletage above her opened red dress, while the right braid hung vertically down in empty space. As the three men selected their baklavas, however, her heart continued to beat, pumping blood through lungs that could no longer oxygenate it and a body that could no longer use it – the only vestige of the life of the woman who had once passionately argued for collectivisation in the conference hall and savagely ravaged Ahmed's body in the bedroom. Gradually, as she hanged, the acidity of her blood increased until it began to poison her heart's pacemaker, causing her heartbeat to become weaker and slower, until, fifteen minutes later, as the men argued about the prospects for the Turkish national football team over their strong black coffee, it ceased.
![Sexy at Execution Grounds [7] by MJ567Club](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/intermediary/f/cc55bd04-7c0e-46f8-a82b-0131901f66f5/d8xe8yc-abf7b45c-a474-44c3-8c02-a90b85a982f1.jpg/v1/fill/w_133,h_200,q_70,strp/sexy_at_execution_grounds__7__by_mj567club_d8xe8yc-200h.jpg)
It was a well written and graphically done story. You really captured the essence of what she went through after the trap was sprung.
good work