writing adventure 28- Silence

     The rope looks almost pristine to him as he stands just inches behind it. It should, he thinks bitterly to himself, it hasn't been used in half a century.
     The crowd around his final stage had gathered there in the morning, before the criminal had even arrived. They didn't know his crime, or even his name, but they were indifferent to details. They were trained to be indifferent to details. All they knew was that the alarm bell had sounded thirteen times at seven in the morning, and that meant to get up and go towards a place most of them have never gone.
     It is called the Training Center, and it is where the man will take his last steps of protest.
     He surveys the crowd, taking the time to stare into the eyes of anyone bold enough to glance at his. He must try to get someone to see how wrong this is, he must get one out of the huddled masses to carry on. He desperately searches for that person, but anyone who has any intelligence knows what will happen if they're caught staring back, and anyone who doesn't can sense they're not supposed to look up at a dead man walking. The crowd is silent. He regards them in his mind as if they are children, and it keeps him from being ashamed at them.
     Instead, he focuses his attention back to the rope. Once the men on either side of him, the men he barely noticed before, believe that the crowd is large enough, they push him forward. He stumbles across the plank, and curses his feet. Of course his last steps on this earth would be weak.
     It is at this moment he realizes he feels fear. The sweat drips down his face and he sees the rope and where his neck will be and the fear he has suppressed through riots and speeches and government interrogations and–
     Oh God in mere minutes I will be dead.
     He looks out the crowd once more, pleadingly this time, and sees a few at the front of the group watching his feet at least. His mind, sensing such an abrupt end, takes this as his only chance.
     "If you learn anything from me," he yells, and the men beside him step back to release the platform underneath him. "If you learn anything from my standing before you here, learn to never be silent. Always speak, always be a presence."
     The crowd, nervous and trained against all he preaches about, think that the man is delirious. The prisoner must surely be joking, and so they begin to laugh.
     They laugh him to the gates of Hell.