Writer’s Challenge #18: Holy Temptation, Ignorance

                                                By David Crerand

The electric clock on the wall did not tick. It seemed like an undue cruelty to force a death row prisoner to listen to the last moments of his life tick tock away.

The last meal sat on the edge of the bed, poked around with a fork but not a bite eaten.

The prisoner stood stock still, staring out a window that did not exist.

The years of appeals were expended. The last visit from the young, female, socially conscious but fashion-deficient, pro-bono civil libertarian attorney ended hours ago with a gentle touch on his hand through the bars and mumbled apologies.

The opportunity to write farewell messages to loved ones had been extended and ignored. The execution procedure had been fully explained and the gurney waited in the small chamber at the end of the short hallway.

And now it came down to the last hand to be played. The residents on the row jokingly called it the “Holy Temptation,” but as time ran out, the seriousness set in. The prison chaplain would hold forth the good book and offer to hear the final confession. A final hope of salvation would, like a carrot tied to a stick, be dangled before the walking dead in the form of a re-birth into the eternal love of Christ Jesus and the promise that the decadence of an evil life and a blackened soul could be washed away in the hypocritical, yet cleansing waters of the chaplain’s portable baptismal fount. 

“Repent, thee sinner!” he imagined the throng outside the prison walls crying out.

From the thief, crucified alongside Christ on that barren hill called Golgotha he heard the sly whisper, “It worked for me man. The other jerk said “no”, but me, I grabbed at that golden ring and got my ass saved for all eternity!”

Like the whining priest played by Pat O’Brien, struggling to save the Dead End Kids from emulating a criminal’s life of crime, wealth and fame. The priest begged his childhood chum Cagney, the wise –cracking hoodlum, to weep and cry like a baby on his way to the electric chair in “Angels with Dirty Faces”.