A Conflagration of Euphoria
by Zachary Robert Long (1322 words, estimated reading time: 6 minutes)

The screams of the women found no purchase on the night air as they were marched to their deaths. From among the crowd that lined either side of their walk were flung insults, rocks, and excrement both animal and human. A missile would strike home causing one or another of the women to stumble, eliciting cheers from the frenzied crowd. From out of the jeering masses a young child emerged to kick at their legs until her mother pulled her away whispering, “Never touch a witch, Alfreda.”

As they were paraded through the town for all to see, each was intimately aware of the fate awaiting them. The stakes that would mark their end lorded over the town from upon the nearby knoll. Fresh-cut from a dead tree, as was the tradition. Every one a personalized termination, the possessions of the guilty spread amongst the kindling at the base of each mast.

“I saw her turn into a rat with my own eye,” a voice yelled over the riot.

“Gave my brother the pox,” another rejoined.

“Never in all my days,” said a kindly sounding matron, “have I ever seen such evil as has befallen us at their hands.”

As the women passed the crowd fell in behind to follow them on the winding path up to the knoll. Only the sick and the aged remained behind, eagerly awaiting the end of the gruesome ceremony when the young would regale them with tales of the witches’ screams, their last minute repentances, and the glory that would be given to God at their demise.

The faces of the women were indistinguishable from one another, so stained where they with mud, blood, excreta, and hopelessness. Eyes heavy-lidded from sleep deprivation, cast at the ground to avoid the impending. No words spilling from cracked lips. What good were words to them now? There was no escape from the situation, whether by smooth-tongue or physical exertion. Here were citizens of their town turned into monsters unrecognizable. The wickedness of their deeds erased them from the memories of those they once called friend, each was less than human and no more than witch. A dozen faceless women marching up the knoll to a dozen stakes.

So it was that none of the villagers noticed that one of the women was not of their clan. Yet the crowd must have known that something was infelicitous for there was but one of the women that seemed to radiate a calmness about her person that all but repelled the rocks and words hurled in her direction. A discerning eye may have noticed the neatness of the mud streaking through her hair and across her face, or that the encrusted blood could be traced back to no wound. But if there was one among them that noticed these details, they gave no voice.

The elders waited at the top of the knoll alongside the parish priest. The man of god held a bible out in front of him like a shield against sin. It mattered not that he couldn’t read the words in the tome. The words were seared in his brain, a lordly brand that marked his rank in the eternal struggle against vileness. He spoke the words expected of him and they were lost in the clamor as was the way with all public displays of capital punishment. The hounds at the door baying loudly enough to drown out divinity.

Fate must be fought at all junctures lest the hopelessness infect the heart as it did these poor women. Each fought against the binds that tied them to the pole, except for one. “She’s ready to repent, that one,” remarked the priest of the lone woman that eagerly leapt up and hugged her stake. A blond haired youth stepped up to turn her around to face the crowd but the priest waved him away. “She’ll burn all the same.”

With the women hitched in place it was time now for the torches to be lit and passed out. Three torches were lit per stake, lest the devil’s wind try to extinguish the redemptive flames.

“More, more, more,” begged the strange woman with her back turned.

The blond haired youth looked to the priest who nodded his acquiescence. Two more torches were lit, ready to be cast at her feet.

Only now did a hush fall upon the crowd. Breath was held as the priest spoke the final Latin syllables. They fought now only with the sobs of the women.

Then he finished and for a glorious moment all was still except for the arc of the torches through the air.

They landed in the kindling, setting it ablaze.

The crowd cheered.

Then the real screaming begun.

Flesh bubbled, blackened, and melted like candle wax, exposing meat and bone. Clothes caught and spread flames upwards to hair that sizzled and smoked. For one brief moment the air smelled like a delicious perfectly cooked sow. Then it smelled like every story of hell that had ever been spoken aloud. The fire reduced human forms to something bestial and delirious, like woodcarvings of Eastern oni. All to a soundtrack of screams that burbled in collapsing lungs, on vocal chords strained to snapping and struggling past oblivion.

The condemned screamed until they slunk in their bindings and screamed no more.

All except for one.

The strange woman that faced away from the crowd screamed the loudest and the longest, writhing in an ecstasy more ungodly than anything the crowd had before seen. Her screams sounded not like agony but rapture, melodic rhapsodies of erotic liberation. She undulated against the stake with such blasphemy as to sicken the priest who regorged his evening meal and collapsed to the ground dead before he stuck.

The cheers of the crowd turned now to hushed whispers as they watched the figure of the priest. Then panic broke out as realization of his death spread. Bodies pressed against one another, shoving and pushing to be the first down off the knoll to escape from the writhing woman’s sensual howls.

Doors and windows were shuttered as the streets emptied, the only figures left in the roadway were the shadows dancing in the light of the flames that tracked down from the burning pyres upon the knoll.

Not one pair of eyes closed that night for all were required to guard against Satan’s ministrations. Parents held their children close and whispered promises of fruit and berry treats to shut out the sounds of that vile woman.

In the morning only the blond haired youth was bold enough to venture up onto the knoll. He was tasked with retrieving the body of the priest which lay where it had fallen to become a feast for the ravens. Like many of the youths in the town, he could not get the face of the strange woman out of his mind. How had he failed to realize he’d never seen her before until this morning? He needed to see her again, to know who or what she was.

But the stake she had been lashed to was empty. The ropes that bound the woman lay in a heap on the ground. The youth hurriedly hefted the corpse of the priest onto his shoulders and fled back into town.

Not a soul returned to remove the stakes or what remained of the other women. They were left to rot and collapse over the course of the summer and fall, until the last of them settled under the weight of a blanket of snow.

Through the years that followed the townsfolk would hear their story repeated again and again, despite their never speaking of it, as traveling merchants brought tales of other burnings and of the mysterious woman that writhed in ecstatic pleasure as flames licked her alabaster flesh, her voice calling out in orgasmic revelry for ever more torches, an inferno climax, a conflagration of euphoria.