Invitation to a Beheading

Cincinnatus is a thirty-year-old teacher sentenced to death for "gnostic turpitude" — the crime of writing poetry in a land where it has been outlawed. As he awaits his final days, the world around him curdles into absurdity: officials are indifferent to truth, and even his fellow prisoners seem adrift in their own delusions. When a new prisoner named Pierre arrives, Cincinnatus takes him for a kindred spirit; what neither man knows is that Pierre is actually the executioner, playing an elaborate game of deception with no end in sight.