Lady Jane

by Todd Abrams

Her headless father was wheeled past her own cell the morning before. Sticky blood red ran through cracks in the wooden cart where his body lay above a wheel that shrieked upon every revolution. Her own bells tolling and the smell of his bowels loosed after the heavy blade separated flesh from flesh, bone from bone, thought from action. Then the dignity of her sixteen years lost as she groped through a hood of black and found the place to lie finally. An ancient crow cried from the distance. In the quiet, hazy square her slaughtered neck pink as the sunset.

6S

Todd Abrams, author of Trieste, writes in Ferndale, Michigan.