The crowd is howling blood. Awaiting death on the scaffold he wonders what he could possibly have done wrong. Has he been misunderstood as a religious fanatic? Did his chronic suspicion get the better of him? His last tumultuous months pass before his eyes. Above all the last hours, a bloody and nocturnal passage through the underworld of the justice system. A system he himself had helped to create. Remorse and relentless self-questioning give way to resentment and rage at the ruling body he led only a few days before, the same people who have placed him on the scaffold. Fury turns to self-reproach and the distasteful and embarrassing business of his personal life. And finally his excesses, so close to his entire reason for being, yet so difficult to acknowledge. Even in the face of death.

Hugh Graham has written on Afghanistan and Iraq for The Walrus and The Toronto Star. Previous fiction titles include Last Words and Ploughing the Seas (Exile Editions) and his short fiction has appeared in Descant, Exile Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead and New Quarterly.

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