When the breeze stopped sweeping the chilling onto Jacque, and his shirt whipped against his back and chest no more, that’s when he first felt genuinely afraid.
The whispers were persistent, growing more deafeningly audible the quieter the world became. The masculine voice was deep yet calming, the characterization of thunder, the boy thought, repeating the same name over and over. His parents stood still, statues of stone frozen with faces of dismay. He was, in other words, gay, and piled under the conservative expectations of his family and peers.Īs he was beginning to lose touch with his sacrilegious reality, many of his fanciful stars flickered away, like a dark emanation of fog and cloud cast over them with the assistance of the western winds, and all he could hear was the whispering of his name. Because the boy didn’t agree politically with the other citizens. He believed in God, just as everyone else in his town, for how else would such enchantingly monstrous creatures like the witches exist, but he couldn’t bring himself to agree with the seemingly endless verses of the Bible. At school he would be told stories about the golden haired women, the witches who knew all of your deepest and darkest secrets - an unfathomable fear of the boy. He would spend most of his nights spread out amongst the soft grass of the town meadows, trying to drown out the regular demonic chanting of his parents. No sun shone that day the only pronounced source of light came from the glowing embers, which to the boy’s delight resembled a cluster of stars against the misty expanse of ash. His mother, his father, the parents of his friends, all had their eyes sealed shut, crucifixes of all kinds held to their chests, mumbling words that the child didn’t understand as they gazed towards the clouded heavens. “Is the witch dead?” he stammered, a burst of cool air fluttering down his shirt.
The peaceful atmosphere of the persecution endured until a boy in the front, of only about nine years of age, broke the deafening silence. The hair, so fair and angelic, seemed to be but a wig unscathed on top of the lifeless girl, glistening in the breeze like an amber lily drifting through a nightmarish swamp. No one in the audience moved, the smouldering flames left to dwindle into nothingness, leaving behind a singed ebony figure with heavenly golden hair resembling the body of a doll.