There was a beautiful sorrow here.

When he was led to the pyre, he watched the sun wink its cold scattered eyes at him. You are a star, he had said to that lovely flaming sphere, and his mistake was to announce it aloud to the startled eyes and trembling fingers clutching their crucifixes like crutches beneath their hands. For that they took him to the square to burn. 

He passed by the village baker, whose sweet honey milk buns and freshly baked breads radiated deliciously cool bursts of fragrance as he puttered along. He wanted to tell him how he would miss those pastries when he was gone, but their shadows disappeared long before his dry lips unsealed to speak. His neighbor and her children gazed at him shamefully for a heartbeat before they pattered back into the shadows, the soft sounds of their cloth shoes against the red mud bricks like the chafed bowing of a guitar against his ears.

There were familiar faces in the crowd watching as he leaned against the wood stake, murmuring in hushed, fluted voices. The words jumbled and lost meaning, he tried to rearrange them with his hands but the crowd jumped back, fearful of him and his untamed mouth.

They are only words, he wanted to say. But they were my words. He looked above him and saw a flock of tiny white birds shoot suddenly against the sky as a burst of water does from a fountain, he heard the faintest rush of wheels against a cobblestone alley, he closed his heart and sealed it away beneath the soft wet earth because it was not wanted here.

He wondered if it had been worth it.

There was a terrible emptiness, he thought, as the first flame sparkled and began to chew its way up his body. A terrible emptiness, where he looked into the eyes of children he had taught and tailors who had sewed his clothes, the blank stares of women who sold their produce and olive oil to him in the market and knew him, for Christ’s sake, knew him, and there they were, impassive and almost proud in their intolerance, strangers again.

He was lonely. He had only his damned words for consolation, and where were they now? He watched his skin char to the color of coal, watched the tips of his fingers crumble to ash, so he began to speak, hoarsely, watched as his breath blew flumes of smoke in the air and his words circled above him and became free things in the sky. He looked up again, and there were sparrows were the size of hens, blinking with their shiny marble eyes as tears rolled down their brown cheeks. 

When his bones turned to salt and his voice ran dry as a summer creek; when the people left, satisfied, and again went back to their muffins and jams, their laundering and gardening; when the night had settled like a thick blanket of black yarn; the sparrows soared over the Campo de’ Fiori, and with their yearning trills retreated into the stars.