The best way to get rid of the evidence, is… eating the apple I stole.
Curiously, it tastes very good. One of the best apple I ever ate! I wonder, whether that is because I stole it? Stolen good teasing to steal more!?
“Delicious, isn’t it?” A woman’s voice says from behind me.
It’s that lady whom I thought she had witnessed by crime. There she stands, eating herself an apple!
“That was naughty of you, Mister!” she says, with irony. “But after all, he better should watch his business instead of lecherously staring at the crucified! So, I took one too!?"
“You see what they do with thieves! You must be eager to get crucified?” I ask her.
She bites a piece out of her apple, and when it is chewed, she continues :
“But don’t feel too much pity with that vendor! Have you seen what he asks for one apple? For the price of one, I buy more than a libra of apples at the market! That’s outrageous! If they crucify thieves, they should nail him, up there, too!”
We both turn our heads towards the crucified thieves.
“Did you come here, to see justice done, or to enjoy the public spectacle of naked bodies in agony!?” she then asks with an inquiring voice.
“I got here, because I was eager for a delicious apple!”
She laughs.
“Good reply! I think, that, amidst all the cruelty of such an execution, there is still something erotic, that makes it an attractive spectacle! Even the crucified themselves experience that!’
“Serious!?” I ask (but somehow feel, she has a point).
“But mind you! I have no pity with them! They had made of theft their profession, their way of life! They deserve it! Yet, I cannot put away the thought, that they enjoy it!” she says.
“I sometimes have that impression too! Even though dying on a cross is excruciatingly painful!”
“I tell you what! See it from this side : there are finer ways to die, but there are also worse one’s.
“What do you mean!?” I ask.
“It starts with a small lump on the breast, that gets bigger. But it is just the visible part of some evil that spreads inside the body, until it reaches the spine! From then on, all that’s left is excruciating pain! Endless, weeks long, and without prospect that it would ever go away! Only when that monster has taken all the force of the body, and devoured all resources, and nothing is left than skin over an exhausted skeleton, it lets its victim die! My grandmother had it, it took my mother and my sister too! And they were ten years younger than my age today! Every night, I dream that I got such a lump on my breast too! I tell you this : best of all, I would like to die in peace! But when I would be offered the choice between forty-eight days of suffering excruciating pain, without any prospect left, or just forty-eight hours of excruciating pain, like those thieves on the cross, my choice would be easily made!”
Her voice had meanwhile turned into some… determination. She finishes her apple and throws away the core.
“Does it disturb you, what I am telling?” she says, now with irony in her voice. “That’s how I am! I sometimes feel I live on borrowed time since a few years!”
“Try to put it out of your mind!” I try to comfort her.
“Maybe, it is by eating lots of apples, that I kept that monster out of my body for so long already!” she says.
“Could be!” I reply.
“What do you think!?” she then says with a naughty voice! “Shall we raid that stall again for another free apple? That vendor is still too distracted!”
I hesitate.
“Come on?” she insists. “Apples are good for health!”
Good for health, or shorten our lives drastically if they catch us! There are still at least two poles unoccupied, and there is always a stock of patibula on the crucifixion site. Everything is in place to nail both of us next to Cire and Andrea!
My common sense heavily protests and engulfs me once more with worry and fear! But somehow, I had already crossed a line – once a thief, always a thief – and all through my feelings of anxiety, a wave of excitement erupts, triggered by a prospect to be crucified together with that woman, like Cire and Andrea are already!
) ...
