The Hanging of Tethys

They hung him at the edge of town. One last shameful act for one of the remaining shameful few. He was a relic of a dwindling past.

Of where his madness came, none knew, and why he drowned his victims, not a soul could imagine.

He ascended the gallows, one soaking boot at a time, baptized in salt water by unseen hands. He recited his verse to the squelching steps.

In the long desert shadows, to the whispers of dried seas and the fossilized deep

Men pass over the stones and sand, burdened without knowledge, of an ocean weighing on their souls

His eyes were sky-bound as they fitted the noose, brine heavy on his breath.

He swung without a kick, bobbing like a corpse at a sea. Like he might slip his noose and rise up into the dimming twilight.

When they cut him down, and his body met the earth, it was not a mans cadaver that remained, by crabs and stranger things, armored for the vile ages that had long passed from life into stone spilling from empty clothes.

His laughter still carries on the wind today, to the sound of waves between desolate mesas.