The weather’s too cold for a hanging, they say. Better to wait until spring. People will bring bread and cheese and make themselves a good picnic. Cheer at the sound of my neck snapping.

Besides, they can’t kill me until after. That’s part of my punishment—keep my body living until I’ve expunged my own sin.

The young doctor comes again today. He’s studying to be a surgeon, and at first I think that is why he is here.

“Cut it out,” I say. “I don’t want it.”

But he just stares at me as if I’m mad, and then the hungry look returns to his eyes. “What kind of woman would commit such a sin?”

“What kind of woman wants to grow a poison?”

He moves to sit beside me on the bed, slipping off his gloves. Gently, he raises his hand to touch my forehead. His skin is cool, as if he’s got no blood in those hands.

“There’s a spot,” he says, tapping at my forehead. “Just here. If we remove it, it might make your time more pleasant. Calm you. It’s a little theory I have.”

I jerk away, but I can’t escape the gleam in his eyes.

“You want to cut out a piece of me while they wait to kill me?” I say. “Just to be certain I understand you.”

He’s hardly listening, just staring at my forehead like he wants to dig a scalpel into it right now, like a kid eager to pick the meat out of a walnut. “It might make you more comfortable.”

I know what they’ve told him. The whispers travel here, even beyond the walls.

That I’ve no conscience.

That I’ve eaten the flesh of the dead.

That when they found me, I’d wiped your blood in a pretty smear about my lips.

I lean in close and whisper in his ear. Thank God he can’t hear my heart, beating like mad with fear.

“Do you want to know what it looked like?” I whisper. “When the knife went through his neck?”

Now it’s my hands again he’s watching. I slip one into his. Hold it. Warm his bloodless veins with it as I tell him more lies.