Rain falls across my shoulders, their harsh coldness sharp as razors on my arms. I see the blood and my throat swells until I cannot breathe. It is his blood, not mine that runs in tiny streaks down my hands, the warmth a stark contrast to the chill of the rain.
My skilled fingers delicately weave in and out of the thorns as if they were needles, gently lifting each away from his skin, careful to keep from cutting the soft skin beneath their angry points. I brush his matted hair away from his face and almost smile. His mother would have laughed to see his hair like this. Her son never would comb his hair.
His face is bruised; the bone of his left cheek is sunken in. His olive skin has faded into an ash gray, and the space below his eye the color of damaged fruit. Caked blood is washed in tiny streams down his cheeks, made moist and slipping away like a merchants wares in a flood.
I have seen many people die. It is not uncommon for there to be several executions in a month, but this was different, his beautifully plain face beaten in, the flesh of his back hanging in shreds to the broken fragments of what had once been ribs.
He had been hung, naked before the eyes of hundreds as if he were a criminal. Did they not recognize him as the one who had fed them? He, a criminal, he who took the little daughter of Isaac in his arms telling her she was beautiful as he kissed her malformed hands.
I saw him there, and his eyes continued to shine, burning into my heart. It was I who had hung him there. No, I was not among those who held the whip or cried out for his doom. No, but it had been I none-the-less. I and the rest of the people.
His eyes had shone bright with love. My stomach turned sour, and yet I could not turn away. How I would have loved to run, to hide myself in the hills or in the brush along the stream. I ached to see love in his eyes, a love for those who had spat in his face, those who would never love him in return.
I bend my head over him and my veil creates a wall, shielding him from the eyes of the cruel. I continue to pull thorns out of his hair, combing through the knots with my fingers. His head falls onto my shoulder and a sob wrenches my lungs. His eyes, his dark eyes that could see into you, behind your words were empty and dull. Never again have I felt such a pain in my soul, an emptiness that could swallow me completely. It was then that I knew he was gone.
"You said you'd never leave me!" I shout to the sky, blind to the storm that turns the clouds into a dangerous black.
"You said that I would never be alone!" I scream, my words blending into the howls of the wind. I remember his laugh, his overwhelming anger over the caged birds of the merchants; the words he wrote that broke my heart and turned away the stones of the loveless.
I cling to his body, burying my face in his damp hair, sobbing into the curls that act as a mute to my anguish.
A man takes him away after a time. The minutes or hours passed a blur of hysteria. Elizabeth takes me into her arms and I bury my face into her shoulder, paying little attention to my bloodied tunic that would surely stain her own. "Joshua" I cry, my tears leaving little pools on her veil. "Joshua is gone" is my last scream, the last words to cross my lips before the darkness overtakes me, leading me into a safe world of unconsciousness.