The man had killed the thing he loved

Reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a small book, an owl embossed on its cover, the pages thin as onion skins. It was about a man on his way to be executed. That line kept coming up. “I don’t get it. Why would you kill the thing you loved?” The softness of his voice, even now, under the deodars in the Court of Freedom, her feet in the grass over his silent body, she could hear his voice, clear but soft. You had to stop whatever you were doing and lean close to hear it. And he had replied so quietly it took a few seconds for it to register. “You kill it before it kills you."


N.B. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a must read for any Oscar Wilde fan.