Death of a Revolutionary

Story I wrote for the Saarang Writing Awards 2011 – Facebook Flash Fiction Competition. The story had to fit in 10 lines and the prompt was, ‘When you have nothing left to burn, you have to set fire to yourself‘.

The revolution had failed. He would never live to see the dawn when his people would walk the streets fearlessly, their heads held high with no muzzles to bow down to. What pained him was that the people didn’t seem to want to. More than the guns of the army or the fear of the tyrant, it was the apathy of the people which had hurt the struggle the most.

At first, he had hoped that the truth would be enough to jolt the people out of their beds. Then, he was sure that the blood of their brothers would push them over the edge. When all else had failed, he had even reluctantly approved a campaign based on lies, magnifying the regime’s atrocities tenfold.

But here they were, the last remnants of the uprising hemmed in by the army on all sides and it was time for the last gamble, the one which he had hoped he would never have to make. He stepped out of his tent to meet his bodyguards dressed in the unfamiliar olive-green of the official forces and the photographer who would beam the graphic pictures of cold-blooded murder of a defenseless prisoner to the outside world. He took a deep breath, searched his mind for appropriately profound last words and said, “Alright, be quick with it.”