Toothbrush
START

Conspiracy to murder The King, or any other member of the Royal Family, is a rather convenient crime to accuse one of, as it is almost a guaranteed way to get rid of someone you simply do not like. I, unfortunately, was one of the accused. After years of working in the castle, someone, at some point, had taken a disliking to me and wanted me out.

Though being sentenced to death was not much of a surprise, hearing those words come from the judge’s mouth was still jarring. My family would have to disown me, disavow the actions of which I was accused, or risk facing a similar fate. The life I had led up until now, would come to an anticlimactic end, lost in the bowels of time.

Being led down to my cell where I will spend the last hours of my life released a torrent of dread. Soon I will die. Nothing more nothing less. No fanfare. No funeral.

The dark, cold, silence of the cell left no other option but to think of my own mortality. As I lay staring at the ceiling wallowing in these desperate thoughts, a strange shuffling sound came down the hallway towards my cell.

“Ye seem t’ be a new face ‘round here,” A horribly raspy voice said.

I slowly rolled my head towards the bars of the door. Peering back at me was the most disheveled man I had ever seen. His beady black eyes shone in the dim light from behind what looked like pounds of matted gray hair. The smell radiating from his body was so foul it was almost visible.

“I'm really not in much of a mood to talk,” I snapped.

“Ah, yer gettin’ th’ ax, jus like all rest o’ th’ lot in here!”

I turned away silently, hoping that ignoring this creature would get it to leave.

“Ya might as well talk t’ me,” he goaded. “Ya don’t got much else t’ do.”

I sat up and glared at him only to see a mostly toothless grin with sparse yellow teeth.

“Oh, ya don’t got t’ look at me like that,” he pouted sarcastically.

“What do you want?” I shot back.

“Well I don’t get t’ talk to many folks ‘round here due t’ the nature of my work so I walk ‘round here an’ try to talk to folks like you.”

I kept looking at him silently. He must have taken this as a signal to keep talking.

“Ya know, ‘bout 153 years back I was sentenced to death, quite like you are now.”

I sighed, resigning myself to the fact that this man was about to talk for what would feel like an eternity.

“I was gonna get th’ ax, so I sat in the cell, jus’ like you, ‘till the guards came to take me to my execution. But when they brought me out, there weren't any executioner, jus’ an ungodly old bastard sittin’ in a fancy wooden chair.”

I had never heard of someone getting out of the death penalty. This, despite my mood, gave me a small piece of hope that maybe I would get out alive. The old man quickly cut off my train of thought.

“That bastard, I can still see his face clear as day!” he spat. “Told me, instead o’ death I’d be sent t’ clean all th’ toilets in th’ castle with a toothbrush.”

For the first time I noticed the bucket that he was holding which was full of gray water and had five toothbrushes floating in it.

“At first, I was probably th’ happiest man on God’s green Earth! But who would ‘ave thought I’d live this long. I tell you, I outlived damn near four o’ those bastard kings!”

He paused for a long while. The silence of the cell returned, only to be broken by the sloshing of his bucket as he set it down.

“Let me tell ya, after ‘bout 150 years o’ this, you’d wish ya died young.”

I had no good response. Though I was to be dead in a couple hours, all I could think of was this poor man and his plight.

“Well I guess I talked t’ ya long enough,” he wheezed.

After another long silence he picked up his bucket and started to shuffle away with much the same cadence he had arrived with.

“Good luck, I guess,” I called after him.

He merely grunted and kept shuffling away into the darkness.

I went back to staring at the ceiling. The feeling of dread, which I had momentarily fled, came back immediately.

The next sound I heard was of hard shoes on the stone floor. It was the solemn guard who came to take me to the last moments of my life, and I could only hope that I wasn't going to be greeted by an ungodly old bastard sitting in a fancy wooden chair.

END