By Lu Xiaobo

The Killing Death Fright

By Lu Xiaobo

Intheworld, some people are good at making affright,andsome can sense the affright of others.

When I was a child,from an old woman,I heard that before an executioner started to chop,they would touch the prisoner’s back neck lightly with the back of the blade before chopping the head of the prisoner.Is the light touch trying the tartness of a knife?It isn’t.The subtlety of the light touch is to shake up the prisoner so as to prepare himself to be chopped.

The affright made by the chilling back of the knife blade definitely made an extreme effect.Though the prisoner’s head wasn’t chopped,his soul had got away from his head.

In order to prove the power of affright,western scientists made an experiment on a prisoner.They told the prisoner that he could choose a death penalty without pain.On the day of execution,the prisoner was escorted to a room.He lay down and stretched his hand into a small window.Then a doctor told the prisoner every step of the execution.“Now we have cut your vein.”Actually his hand was justscratched slightly by the back of the knife.And then the doctor reported again,“You can hear the sound of drop of your blood.”In fact,the sound of the drop made by the drop from water tap dropped in bronze basin.

Step by step,the prisoner died from convulsion.The conclusion is that actually he died from affright,or we could say that he was frightened into death.

Due to my job,I once had a chance to see an execution by shooting.The prisonerkneeledontheexecution ground,and a legal examiner marked a white sign on the heart.Then a solider pointed that sign with a gun.A fire was shot from the gun at a distance of the length of a bayonet.

Many years later, a female friend said itwastoocruel when she heard about that.You could imagine how frightened he was to the white sign,and how he felt when the bayonet was pointed him again and again?

She is a writer,apt to feel the affright of others perhaps due to her profession.I appreciate her concern,with no discriminate against prisoners.For criminals,death sentence is a deadly penalty.Yet they still have the right to be free from affright and pain,otherwise there won’t be such a progress which turned shooting execution to lethal injection.

The concern on affright is a basis of all virtue.

(FromTales of a Night-shiftEditor, ShanghaiSanlian Bookshop.Illustration:Chi Xingcheng,Tong Ling)