He was already dead when he was hanged.

I couldn’t see, of course. Too small. I knew he was dead because Mother and Father had been whispering about it ever since the hue and cry was raised, and because I knew which woman was his wife, and because the echoes of her wails still rang in my ears.

Once–it can’t have been long before the hangings, but I have little way to tell–the dead man had sold my mother bread. He was taller than anyone I’d ever seen but he didn’t frighten me. A smile of crooked teeth stretched into ruddy cheeks. A gentle hand; the earthen scent of flour and dough and woodfire; a loaf slipped into my hands. I held it against my chest as though it were a small animal, and if I closed my eyes and let the warmth seep into my skin I could almost convince myself that it was.

I thought of that morning, sunlight dappling the baker’s hair as it snuck in through cracks in the shutters, and wondered after his crime. What sin could be so heinous that one’s empty husk deserved
  to
      be
          hanged?

A pair of words, barely whispered, shivered through the crowd like a breeze through dead leaves. In frenesi. Two little words, words I would only later come to understand, and yet they felt so heavy as I weighed them up in my mind, tasted them on my tongue.

In frenesi.

Even now, they grip me like claws about my throat if I try to choke them out.

In frenesi.

Only once did I go back to view his body, that affront to God, twisting on its rope. For by then my mother had explained to me the baker’s sin. I looked up at him, peering through the watery sunrise. The gallows made him appear taller than he was in life. Grey gnarled fingers; the sickly scent of rot and decay; hollowed cheeks like scores in bread. A husk of a man, scraped clean of its soul.

Afterwards, I went to the church and prayed for the town. Prayed for God’s forgiveness. Prayed that hanging a hanged man was enough to atone for the hanged man’s sins.

He did not frighten me in life, but still I am haunted by him.

For he was already dead when he was hanged.