Michael Jones
More irate than pirate, Michael Jones had found himself locked in at his majesty’s pleasure.
Through the cell’s stone porthole he could hear the cannon calling and the army marching to the sound of the guns.
Ships offshore ablaze with fire off starboard bows now laced with the agony of a drowned death.
Chaos surrounded him, yet trapped in punitive amber he was the still point of the turning world.
The battle would eventually reach him, but by then it was too late.
The poison he’d been able to hide upon his arrest had long since been taken, and Michael Jones would be found dead on the floor of his cell before dusk.
Rats circled him with Lilliputian industry, and had already begun gnawing at his face, contorted and disfigured by the small bottle of hemlock, insurance he’d carried for years.
His secrets would die with him, but that afternoon a truth was born.
That in the finish, Michael Jones was a coward.
Consumed by the anxieties of the future, he’d rather take his own life than have someone take it for him.
