Masked

Most people would say that the dying is the worst part. It isn't true. The worst part is the mask. Dark. Stinkin of some other schmuck's rancid fear sweat and rotten last meal. A dying man doesn't care much for oral hygiene. The mask isn't for the man standing in the gallows. It's for the audience. The twisted faceless beings in the mob. The mask is so they don't have to look into my eyes and see the spark of light vanish as quickly as the drop of the trap door. The sound of my soul exiting stage left will be a hollow thunk of dry, knotted wood on dry knotted wood. They'll remember that thunk. It'll be a fleeting moment, a week or a month from now. In that vulnerable moment in the gap between waking and sleeping, that wooden death knock will echo in their mind and remind them that they were a part of this. But the guilt won't be half so bad as without the mask. Having a thousand accusing eyes locked in hollow glazed half-lidded leers is hell even for a moment. The only thing worse is knowing those eyes are on you and not being able to see them. In the darkness of the mask, the thousand hollow eyes become infinite. The imagination of the man who faces death in a choking, cloth prison faces a torture unmatched by brief tightening of the noose, a drop, a jerk, a brief twitching dance and then, enter the void. Death seems a relief. A man who witnesses death owns a shaded spark of relief in his eye, the relief of watching a person destroyed and knowing that, this time, it wasn't himself.

The dying man knows the mask is to be feared more than death.