Severance: Three Fictions: Marcus Tullius Cicero, and: Katheryn Howard, and: Claude Messner

After careful study and due deliberation it is in my opinion the head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation.

- Dr. Dassy d'Estaing, 1883

In a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.

- Dr. Emily Reasoner, A Sourcebook of Speech, 1975

Marcus Tullius Cicero

orator and politician, beheaded on orders of Mark Antony, 43 B.C.

speak louder, Marcus Tullius, I cannot hear you, speak louder, Helvia my noble mother her forehead ringed in curls calling from the top row of the empty theater, and my arms are leaden from a thousand apt gestures, and I cannot think and I am small, stand straight she cries I lift my upper body and the senators are packed before me like sardelles straight from the sea their eyes unblinking their mouths gaping my voice rings through the curia and I feel the comforting press of my toga over my shoulder and now the senate is empty but for Antony, speak up he says I cannot hear you, his centurions are nowhere in sight and I straighten and say, if, noble Antony, your nobility were made coinage for the empire its measure would be - I falter - I adjust the toga folds about my chest, searching for an appropriately miniscule measure - but time is running quickly, I know - I have no arms to lift - your nobility, I say, is the nobility of green flies on goat shit they glitter in the sunlight and they eat and they move their wings and fly but their life is short and Antony lifts up on diaphanous wings and rises and vanishes and now a woman's voice says speak up, Marcus Tullius, speak up I cannot hear you and I say, o noble mother, Helvia, if your nobility were made coinage for the empire

Katheryn Howard

Queen of England, beheaded for adultery by Henry VIII, 1542

what a tumble what a tumble rolling in the sudden dark the secret parts of my body my own body recently giving forth blood thick and fragrant and then, soon after, my first Henry, Henry the First, whose hands I whisper my secrets to who touches my hidden body my self and what sweet tumblings roll through me Henry who teaches me the flute I hold in two hands and blow into his flute and there is music and then the dark of night in Lambeth my step-grandmother somewhere far away in another room and I lie dormitoried amidst the unmarried girls with great unseen puffing all about and my own Francis, Francis the First, king of the dark, and he places his secret inside mine and what a tumble it is breaking me in two and then reuniting me turning me into him, and Henry my second, eighth to the realm, his body enormous and folded into hidden places and he has parts only I will touch, the abscess of his leg issuing forth a pale green flow, Do you not find this loathsome, he asks, softly for once, no I say it is our secret, and my cousin Thomas whose pepper I am happy to cull pulled from the deep earth for me to see and it destroys me at last I walk unsteady to the block has it happened I can't remember I can't see I tumble

Claude Messner

homeless man, decapitated by Amtrak train after laying his neck on the track, 2000

oh no not him again from the rush of a fucking train I get the old man, what's taking that goddamn train so long it was here a moment ago, maybe it's lying on its side jumped by a penny on the track I hide in the weeds and my shiny Lincoln-head is out there waiting for the Illinois Central from Chicago and I know I should be thinking about the careening of the engine and the flight of...