C. K. Williams

F L T

The Nail

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,
the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:
that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.
Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ ll never catch your breath,
mind imagines — how not be annihilated by it? — the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,