The prisoner woke up in his cell on the edge of the sea early in the morning. He was to die this day, as planned. The sun was white as it rose over the water, and the sky was empty, and the horizon was a pale rind speckled with distant ships. Today there was a white stone on the sill of the barred window that had not been there before; an old beggar who’d been walking by, shouting nonsense about the end of the world, had put it there. The prisoner, a young man who did not want to die and believed he was justified in the murder he committed, did nothing with the stone and thought nothing of it until the early afternoon, when it grew hot in the cell and when he knew his hour of death was nigh. He was to be hanged with three other criminals who were way worse men than he. The guard dropped off a pot of delicious beef stew and a loaf of wheat bread, which he devoured, and then he began to pace the stone floor back and forth. “It can’t be,” he said, and screamed. “I am an innocent man! An innocent man!”
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