Once upon a time in a far-away kingdom there lived an executioner, and a busy and prosperous executioner she was thanks to one happy and undeniable fact: the king was absolutely batshit. He would execute someone for having a shadow longer than his, or for whistling out of tune, or because they looked a little too much like someone he’d already had executed and he wanted to be sure the job had been done right. All day long the executioner’s axe sang and warbled; all evening long the gallows grew heavy with human fruit; and all night she slept the sleep of the gainfully and exhaustively employed. And lo, everyone was most happy, except for the peasants, until that fateful day when the executioner was putting away her cutting-block and she heard the most terrifying words that could be spoken in all the land: “I’m bored.”
“Pardon, my liege?” she inquired obsequiously.
“I’m bored,” whined the king, scratching his beard absently for leftovers from dinner. “Always the same old chop, chop, chop. Always the same old drop, drop, drop. Why can’t we have fun?”
“I could draw and quarter them, my liege,” offered the executioner.
“Boring.”
“I could break them upon the wheel?”
“Boooooring.”
“I could crucify the”
“BORING, BORING, BORING,” sang the king. “And the bishop would get crabby and lecture me, and that’s TWICE as boring, and then you’d have to execute him too and it would be TRIPLE boring! I want a new execution tomorrow morning first thing or I’ll get one of the prisoners to execute you instead. Maybe the irony would be funny.”
The executioner was quite upset by this and didn’t appreciate the irony in the slightest, and the thought of her prized axe (she called it Daffodil) falling into the smelly hands of some upstart peasant appalled her, so she did what everyone in need of advice did: she went to her mother.
“Mom, the king’s going to execute me unless I come up with a new execution by tomorrow,” she said.
“I told you not to get into this job,” said the executioner’s mother. “But did you listen to me? No, no, no, too big for your britches, too clever to listen, and off you went without so much as pretending to care.”
After three cups of tea the executioner escaped and did what everyone else in need of advice did: she went to her grandmother.
***
“Granma, the king’s going to execute me unless I come up with a new execution by tomorrow,” she said.
“Oh well,” said the executioner’s granma, offering her a tin of old, crumbly sugar cookies. “These things happen. Your grandfather was executed twice you know, bless his soul. After the second time the blade fell off the axe they just gave up.”
“I take much too careful care of Daffodil to let that happen,” mourned the executioner.
“Go to the beach then,” said granma. “Take the evening off. No sense worrying about tomorrow before it comes, you’ll give yourself fits. Here, bring a sandwich.”
The executioner accepted granma’s sandwich with care, reverence, and trepidation, walked to the beach, and dissected it with care. It seemed to be made of some sort of pickles mixed with some sort of thing that had once been bread, the two intertwined so deeply that they could not be discerned. After her tenth attempt at finding cheese inside it only to discover that – once again – the cheese was merely curdled crust, the executioner threw the sandwich away and watched as sixteen separate seagulls descended upon it and pulled it in sixteen separate ways.
And as she watched, she felt an idea crawl its way up the back of her neck into her skull.
***
Just after dawn, the king was led down to the seashore where the wind blew and the gulls glared suspiciously from the cliffs.
“It’s damp,” he complained. “I don’t like damp. Are you going to drown them? That’s boring. My nose is itchy.”
“Sorry my liege; no my liege; sorry my liege,” rattled off the executioner, as she carefully finished placing a collar made of razor blades around the prisoner’s neck, holding a leash attached to it with utmost care. “Now watch this.”
She tied a sandwich to the far end of the leash.
The gulls watched.
She threw the sandwich to the sand.
The gulls moved and pulled the leash in sixteen separate ways, slicing the prisoner’s neck into sixteen separate pieces, which were immediately scooped up by some of the gulls that had missed out on sandwich.
“I call it the gullotine,” said the executioner.
“Wonderful!” applauded the king. “Magnificent! Hilarious! I hate it here, let’s never execute someone like this again. Come up with a new trick by tomorrow or I’ll have them drown you boringly for boring me.”
***
“…And then he said he’d drown me,” said the executioner.
“It’s no more than you deserve for never learning to swim,” said the executioner’s mother sternly. “We paid good money for those lessons and for what? For what, I say? You didn’t care, you didn’t appreciate them, you whined and complained and acted like the water was poison and we had to apologize to the instructor. Why I just about died of shame from that, never mind asking for a refund, and because of it your sister never got a chance to learn either, poor thing.”
“Hey what’s that?” asked the executioner, pointing over her mother’s shoulder, and then she dove out the window and ran to her granma’s house.
“…And then he said he’d drown me,” she told her granma.
“Who?” asked granma. “That’s a sentence fragment, dear.”
“The king. He didn’t like the beach, and he’s bored again. He wants me to come up with a new kind of execution by tomorrow or he’ll drown me.”
“Well, no sense worrying, no sense worrying, you’ll give yourself fits over worrying. It won’t get better if you pick at it, you know.”
“I know, I know,” said the executioner. “Oh. I know. Thank you, granma.”
“It’s no problem dear.”
***
At dawn, the king watched in silence as the prisoner was tied to a stake and the executioner brought out a big bucket.
“Are you going to pour molten lead on her?” he asked. “I saw molten lead last month.”
“No, my liege,” said the executioner. “This is a ground-up rose hip hairs.”
Then she emptied the bucket over the prisoner.
Then she got another bucket and emptied it over the prisoner.
And another.
Then she untied the prisoner’s hands, and the resultant itching frenzy lasted twenty minutes, becoming fatal at about fifteen.
“I’m itchy too now,” complained the king, scraping at his neckbeard. “Ugh. Jeez. Don’t ever do this again. I want to see something new tomorrow morning or I’ll execute you too. Gross. Ewwww.”
***
The executioner went to see her mother.
“Serves you right,” said her mother.
The executioner went to see her granma, but she’d died of Old that morning and had already been buried by some hasty neighbours.
***
That morning the prisoner was brought out and the executioner stood next to him and her block holding Daffodil, mind racing sleeplessly.
The king was watching. Everyone was watching. She’d been up all night. And not one thing was coming to mind.
She could drop them off the tower? No, that was just a sloppy hanging. She could grate their skin off? No, that was too close to the itching-powder trick. She could skin them? She had no time to get tools and Daffodil would never work. Oh god, what would she do? What would she do? What would she do.
The executioner was trembling, she realized. Her hands were shaking, her nerves were on fire, her eyeballs were sweating. And beside her, the prisoner was even worse.
If she kept worrying, she’d give herself fits, just like granma used to oh was it that simple.
Slowly, carefully, the executioner picked up daffodil.
Slowly, carefully, the executioner stepped up to the prisoner.
Slowly, carefully, the executioner leaned in close, face to face.
And then she gently opened her mouth and screamed “BOO.”
The prisoner died on the spot of a heart attack.
“Hurray!” cheered the executioner. “It worked! Did you see, that my liege?”
The king didn’t answer.
“My liege?” repeated the executioner.
The king didn’t answer.
“My liege?” inquired the executioner.
The king didn’t answer and the executioner turned around and saw that perhaps she’d startled more than one person.
***
She had to flee the country, of course. But it wasn’t all bad. She became a lumberjack, so Daffodil still got plenty of work. And she got to not write her mother often enough.