Unburning: A Time Loop Survival Romance

I didn’t know today was the day I would die until they brought me to the courtyard, but I had known it would be soon after they shaved my head. That was two days ago. Now my shoulders — reset three weeks ago — are pulling painfully, stretched out to reach the iron ring my cuffed hands are tied to. I breathe in the bottom of my ribs and something clicks that should not click. Each breath is another small triumph in staying alive. I haven’t wanted to stay alive since they took me.

This morning they brought me a bucket of water, a rag, and a dress. A penitent’s dress. White. It hangs on me like a sack, cuffs falling past my fingers, hem dragging on the floor. It covers every mark on my body, and I think that’s partly by design. I put it on anyway. The guard re-tied my hands afterwards and left.

When he came back, he walked me down the hall and out into a parking lot. The sun washed everything pale. They’ve turned the lot into an execution ground.

The ground is blacktop, rough with broken areas and the faint yellow lines of parking spots and fire lanes. Heat rises off it. It’s a little after noon, maybe — I haven’t seen the sun in weeks and I’m guessing. The smell of smoke, gasoline, and burnt tar hangs in the air, and I know I am not the first witch they’ve burned here. Just the first one today.

They tied me to the post and left me to wait. The sun was high. I don’t know how long I stood there. I wanted to scream at the crowd filing in behind the barricades — why are you here, why did you come — but the heat and my own weakness let me retreat from my body, and when I come back the sun is low and the shadows are long, and the men in the black robes are here, and the straw at my feet is wet with kerosene.

The fumes come up through the thin fabric, across the wound on my left thigh. The wound is hot. Hotter than the air. Hotter than the kerosene seeping up the hem.

I finished carving it the night before last with the sharpened edge of my right middle fingernail. I did not tell anyone. It is scabbed over, pink under the scab, and it has been warm since I woke and warmer every hour since. I think I made something I did not mean to make.

The crowd behind the barricades is not screaming. In the movies the crowd screams. In real life they come with water bottles and they watch. Some of them are filming.

The air tastes like matches and pennies. The horizon is yellow. Something is moving above us that no one has announced and everyone can feel. My death is not the only thing happening here.

My jailer is in front of me. His name is Robin, he told me. He tries to sound kind, like he truly wants me to live. Like I truly have sins to confess.

He’s wearing the same plain black robe as the others, and his face is like stone. There’s something in the set of his mouth that I’m too tired to read. The torch in his right hand is already lit. The scar along his jaw catches the flame. I have stared at that scar for weeks across a cell lit by a single bulb. I have not asked how he got it. I never will.

His face is emptied. Not cruel. Not cold. Hollowed out on purpose for the work. I know this face better than my own. I know the muscle in his throat that moves when he is about to speak.

It moves.

“In nomine Christi, confess and be absolved.”

Seven words. Latin braided with English — a binding invocation, not a question. Something pulls at the center of my chest when he says it, faint, a hook set long ago. He has asked me to do this every day for I do not know how long.

He waits for me to answer as he always does. Even this last time.

This is the part where I am supposed to break. Give him the names. Other witches, the survivors from my coven. Other covens. Caches of artifacts and supplies. The names of heretics who sheltered me. The ways I escaped detection for as long as I did. All of it. They promise if I speak, all of this ends. I know it’s a lie.

My mouth fills with copper — it has been filling with copper for weeks, the cut inside my cheek never closing because I keep opening it — and my body does what my body wants. I turn my head and spit. The blood lands on the silver chain at his collar. Saliva clings to the small cross that hangs from it, runs down to the cross’s foot, drips.

The crowd makes a sound, one sound, low.

His eyes do something. Not anger. Something else. Gone.

My voice, when it comes out, is lower than I ever knew it could go.

“Light it, you motherfucker.”

For a second he does not move. Then his hand comes down.

The kerosene catches in a breath. Heat arrives as one thing, a wall, and takes the air from my lungs before the pain does. The shift goes. I can’t breathe, I’m choking. My scalp where the hair used to be goes cold and then goes hot. A sound comes out of me, high and torn, and I did not decide to make it. Smoke, and inside the smoke the smell of hair. I still can’t breathe, it hurtsand the wound on my thigh goes white-hot in a way that is not the fire — a separate heat, a wrenching feeling —

The edges of everything fold in.

The world goes white.