Convinced of another's guilt, sure of the rightness of the thing, one man allowed a second to hang himself. The survivor's penitence came later, when he found himself confined to a short and shallow bed, saw his feet buried and stretched like underground rivers to a far off sea while his arms pulled behind until they touched the mountains. Should he so much as shake a leg, volcanoes erupted, landslides thundered upon alpine villages, floods drowned thousands. Every twitch of his fingers, the slightest tremor of his hand, carried off sailors, crushed coastal dwellings, collapsed cliffs over human habitation. Weary of the slaughter and withering with the strain of lying still, he warred against his limbs to instil paralysis.

No sooner had he conquered mobility than he saw a leathery egg rolling where his intestines should have wound. Pale shapes just perceptible through the shell animated it, made it bump and bang between his thorax and pelvic basin, calling down with each shudder catastrophe upon distant souls. The arrangement was unbearable, wantonly cruel. Virtue could not exact the blood of so many merely to secure the punishment of one.

He twisted off the bed. His limbs broke like husks of dead insects in a winter burrow. The fallen egg cracked to release its hatch of demons. They promptly devoured the man's remains. He dared hope that all would end so, with a dry corpse swallowed piece by piece. But the darkness remained when all else was gone, cast awareness into a greyish ochre of nothing.

When memory tinged the emptiness, gave a tint of self to the cloud, the man was suddenly back in the torturous bed, with his extremities buried and the shell again for bowels. The torment no longer terrified. He knew then that he could revisit the noose, could thrust in his own head a thousand times before turning his back, before abetting desperation in letting another strangle.