Gibbet

or, a short story

During university I would walk up a hill to get to class. It wasn't far—the journey taking me along a path fringed by bushes and reeds, the gentle incline winding beside a small creek flowing with water that sparkled like dew—but it was enough of a walk that a 9 a.m. lecture posed a problem when I awoke blurry-eyed and hungover with fifteen minutes to spare. Which, I realise, was most days.

In that regrettable state I would hurry up the hill, often alone, my eyes drawn to the ants that formed endless trails along the ground in either direction, their movement one long and furious line. My mind, incapable of anything else, would think of the thousands of biochemical reactions that clicked away beneath the chitinous skin of their legs, the machinations of metabolic pathways brutal and efficient and that continued without fail, my own limbs—enormous and elongated in comparison—undergoing the same miraculous deeds. Sometimes though, I’d walk with friends, those whose choice of degree was like my own or whose classes and tutorials were housed in the buildings set high upon that mound: the squat structures, the lecture halls, the laboratories and enclosures.

The name of the hill meant gallows, derived from an old French term. It was a word I didn't know. I just accepted that name and walked there each day, proceeding like the clockwork automaton that I was: not yet twenty, a fragile form with full, thick hair (hair that within ten years would thin and disperse and crumble away), with hands that were soft and untouched by hurt, fingernails clipped and clean and having never scraped the soil in search of its truth.

For reasons that I didn’t care to understand, the hill was where the math and biology took place; everything else—the law, the economics, the many other subjects unknown to my mind—was below, sprawled out between a lake and forest and circumscribed by a road whose only traffic was from students lucky enough to own a car. It made the hill a second kind of campus. Its own bubble, in a way. When I think about it now, the whole place was a bubble: a campus that excluded you from the proximity of a city destroyed during the war, hiding you in trees and greenery and doing so as though it wished you to remain ignorant to the history of its surrounds. But even with this fact, even with the knowledge that the campus was a kind of domed retreat, the hill—the mound and all it contained—was its own special, strange place.

At the top of the hill, released from the path’s necessary constraint, the procession of students—bumbling and half awake in the crisp morning air—would disperse, to dissolve into the buildings and lecture theatres, the tiered halls where the sordid history of its occupants was immortalised into the wooden railings and seats, tales of a thousand lives carved in love letters and curses, words profane and mundane and desperate to be read; to the oval rooms, the places where the equations took place, where walls were adorned in symbols chalked and alien to my eyes; and finally, to the laboratories, the sterile rooms where eggs were injected with liquids limpid and virulent, the darkened embryo of an ill-fated chick illuminated by a lamp as the nutrients it should have received were given over instead to the replication of a billion, trillion capsids, their perfect geometry enveloped in lipids and housing the pure and pyrimidinical code that, if asked and if capable, would speak of the ways to replicate its form.

It was there that I found myself, hunched over the bench and adorned in white, unprepared and inept, incapable of even the simplest task. There, under the flat fluorescence of yellowing lights, I spent my hours each week. And it was there where I first met the one whose name was like an old English folk song, the lilt of her surname making you want to whistle the harmony that would vibrate through her eyes and down the long and golden strands she kept tied behind her head. She spoke to me one morning when I was lost, as I fumbled my way through a procedure so basic I could do it now without even a single glance, her accent Irish or Scottish or from some place so foreign to my ears that it felt from far away. I will help you, she said, opening her notebook and explaining what I should have already known. I will guide you, she continued as I stepped aside, gliding by as though a ghost, the scent of her hair like lilac or the first rays at dawn. And she did help. She was talented, quick to understand, had done all the reading that I hadn’t, drawing my awareness even more to the incompetence I seemed so willing to wield.

Later, some days after, in my dormitory pigeon hole there was a note bearing my name. It was from her, from the girl with the surname like an old folklore song, written with a type of pencil I couldn’t then understand. She spoke of feelings, of a need to meet, of words blinding in their graphite hues. That night, as the moon raked the sky, I went to her room, walking through the nest of beings who inhabited her dorm, their eyes wary of my presence as I moved. Within the cramped confines of her room, we sat and sprawled on her bed, remaining so for several hours, doing nothing but speaking of our incomplete hearts. Hers she laid bare, extracting it from her ribs and placing it in my hand, letting me see the way it beat, feeling its weight with its blood and valves, the pulse it kept even when detached from her chest. It was an autopsy, I realised—one of feelings set out for me to probe. My own heart, I found, was locked. It was a chasm, black and dire and uncertain of what it should be.

When I left, when I slid away confused and yet somehow warm, I meandered towards the hill, my feet carrying me as though they thought it was morning. The moon had left and the sun was yet asleep, an hour seldom witnessed by any eyes of human form. Though I could not see the ants, I knew that they were there, continuing their endless march and uncaring of the giant who stalked by their side. I moved silently in the dark, finding myself drawn ever towards the hill, listening to the sound of the creek twinkling somewhere nearby, its water clear as dew and flowing to wherever it meant to be. As I glanced up, I could make out a faint glow. There, atop the mound and between the thick boundary of trees, something moved. It was a noose, I realised. A noose swaying gently in the wind, attached to the scaffold of a gallows that I knew had never been there before.

To be concluded… (here).

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A short postscript. This began as one thing and, like things often do, turned into something else. I’m wary of length, so I’m pausing at this point, to continue and conclude next time. Thanks so much for reading. It means a lot. If you’d like to, you can hit the Like button and drop a comment. I always love it when you drop by for a comment.

Oh, and another thing. I sort of (quietly, sheepishly) turned on paid subscriptions last week. Very little will change. Posts will remain free, except for a once-a-month additional thing. I’ve yet to work out the precise details. My dream is to write full time, and if I’m to ever nudge toward that then this feels like the next step. So, if you’d like to support my dream, you now can.

The image for this post comes from the incredible talent of

Susie Mawhinney

, who writes A Hill and I. Not only is Susie a remarkable and gifted photographer, she is a truly gifted writer. Her pieces capture the feelings elicited by the land, seasons, and nature in her own corner of Aveyron in France. Her writing is entrancing, beautiful, poetic. I’m honoured to share one of her photographs here and am reminded of the wonderful community that this platform nurtures.

Image credit: Susie Mawhinney