Here we give our satirists a very big house, which they like. But they are tired. They crack their walnuts on the ornamental fountain and sigh. And I, said the executioner, am also tired from doing my terrible job, which is to kill people, and I am looking forward to a well-earned tall, frosty beer. You poor thing. Well the weather outside is frightful, but we have developed beautiful clothes, he tells me. In my hometown, he tells me, in the fronds and folds of my brain, are many escape routes. When I was a young adult I spake as a young adult, I understood as a young adult, I thought as a young adult. In my hometown the escape routes healed over. He tells me, he tells me. I sat in a cardboard car and nothing happened. When I was walking home and nobody would talk to me a portal opened in the alleyway behind the school. A leopard put its head through and said, We don’t want you and the portal closed. Then I was offered a place at an enchanted school, for people who are different and brilliant, and I was very excited. I packed my trumpet case with clothes, but received a letter informing me to take nothing with me and to leave now. It was a monastery and I was to take a vow of electricity; I mean elasticity; I mean chastity. They would pick me up under the street light. I stood under the street light and the same leopard descended on a cloud and explained there had been an administrative error. I watched him gather up my neighbour, Donburov, and carry him away like a sycamore seed. To the stars, he tells me. Sparks fly downward. Soon he couldn’t make them out anymore, and the next day he had to explain what had happened to Donburov’s parents, but they thought he was covering something up. What the hell have you done to our son you piece of shit. Weeks of hopeless interrogation in a cube-shaped room with no windows, a notebook the colour of the walls. That’s how he became an executioner. Lord there’s something that smells so bad about executioners. The leopard was dressed in such finery, he tells me, eyes milking over.