A whumpee is caught trying to escape or fomenting rebellion. They are dragged out into a public place and bound kneeling with their hands cuffed to the ground in front of them. The ritual number of lashes is given, furrowing their back and flicking around the edges of their shoulders, their arms, the bare soles of their feet.
When the whip stills for the last time, they sag forwards, hardly able to believe they survived. But they are not released, and dimly they hear the number of hours they must wait under the sun before they will be released.
They took a whipping. They can survive the waiting.
They can’t muster the energy to flinch when something weighted thunks down near their slumped body, but it doesn’t inflict more pain on them, and they ignore it in favor of making sure they manage to take one breath, and then another.
They can hear people passing by. They’ll be a spectacle, a lesson, a witness to the folly of resistance.
They’ll be a symbol, a sign, a marker that there are still those who dream of freedom.
Footsteps pass closer. It’s fine, they have to get through the square somehow. But then they pause, and the whumpee cracks tear-crusted eyes open to see an arm dipping into the bucket that’s been left next to them.
They catch, briefly, the look of regret on the civilian’s face – and behind them the watchful guards – before they toss the handful of salt across the whumpee’s torn-open back.
When awareness fades back in from the white-hot spike that pierced them, the whumpee cowers from the sounds of more people passing through the busy square. Each one slows, as they must, to dip their hand into the bucket and offer tribute to the spectre of order propped up by looming guards and the vice of collective fear.