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They were going to make this public, live on cable news and all the networks. Facebook and YouTube. 

All pretense had been abandoned, and men in dark religious garb thronged the periphery.

A small black-haired woman with olive skin, barely covered by a white cotton slip and thin as a wishbone, was led in shackles to the stage.

Since there was no one else left to tell this story, she took them up on their token offer of final words. Two minutes were all she had left in the world. She leaned like a nightclub singer into the mic, her manacled hands behind the swanlike curve of her back, a doomed ballerina. 

“If I hadn’t stood with my placard at the last protest, you wouldn’t have been able to tell I was any different from you. And in many ways I’m not.” Her voice shook like the tiny aftershocks of some long-abated cataclysm, but she continued. “I eat and breathe and love my family and my friends. Loved, that is…” Again, she hesitated, a look of abject sorrow passing across her delicate face, so forlorn it silenced the auditorium more than her words.

“Fuck your feelings!” yelled someone in the crowd, after the brief hush.

She breathed in deeply and straightened her posture, a frail young woman wishing she was a warrior, and she continued through the shouted insults: snowflake, cunt, wetback, dyke, libtard…

“But they are gone now, as you no doubt know. Everyone I loved. And I know you don’t love me, and even revel in my pain. And that, my tormentors, is where the true difference lies. You were playing to win, as if there were scorecards and touchdowns, baskets, runs, and goals. You grew to hate us when we defended successfully or attacked with passion and skill. Even when we played fair. Especially when we played fair. That seemed to enrage you all the more; perhaps you mistook our joy for piety. But here’s something: we weren’t playing a game. We were doing it to improve the world, to make it better for our friends, for our children, for our neighbors, and for those who had been given fewer chances than others. And also for you, had you but noticed. They’ve played you. This heartless sociopathic coward who was born on third base and even then had to constantly cheat”—among the officials, the elderly white senators and representatives gathered by the stage, there was a brief flurry of activity at this, but she refused to be distracted—“has somehow turned your heads, and you’re now all that’s left. It will be a joyless, determinate world you’re left with, the last of its love leaching away to mingle and be tainted with the toxins now allowed—encouraged, even—by the last futile industries. We wanted to stop all that, make things better. Share the astonishing beauty with our children and theirs, forward into a dream of a future we might have fashioned from our sisterhood, our brotherhood, our commonality, our better angels. You saw it as a game, and you won. But what did you win? Really, what did you win?”

“Enough!” came a voice. A youngish man, prematurely bald, eyes baleful and hooded as something best left in a reeking cave, stepped forward and smirked at her without humor. “Your time is up, in every sense. Your kind is gone from the world now. It is done.” 

At some subtle signal, the clergymen advanced, faces hidden, gleaming swords and deadly knives raised.

The trembling woman closed her eyes, thought of wheeling star fields over summer-night beaches, of a single moment with her little sister—something about a dispute, an offer of ice-cream cake, and a sudden forgiving smile.

“Glory be to power. Power is great!” rang from vast speakers on all sides, and the bloody execution began.