Saudi Executioner’s Shoulder Giving Him Hell Lately

“400 RIYAL. 400 riyal that robbing bastard just charged me, to tell me something I already know”

Make no bones about it, Ahmed Saliba is not a happy man at the moment. Suffering from chronic pain in his right shoulder, the Saudi Arabian executioner has just visited a physiotherapist who charged him the equivalent of €120 without so much as laying a hand on him.

“He said, you need to come back at least four more times… it’s just a money racket, is what it is”.

The pain in Saliba’s sword-swinging shoulder has gotten unbearable in the past week due to the executions in Saudi Arabia of 47 people convicted of terrorism, including the prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

The unprecedented amount of executions in early January has 2016 off to a good head-start for Saudi beheading figures, which totaled approximately 157 for the whole of 2015.

If the pace keeps up, the Saudi government looks set to comfortably beat the 1995 record of 192 executions, which Saliba claims will leave him barely able to lift his arm by the middle of the year.

“Sometimes I’ll be beheading a lad who was sentenced to death for adultery, and I think seriously, they coulda just flogged this lad and given me the day off,” said Saliba, while rubbing Deep Heat on himself.

“Back before they started to chase the title of most yearly executions, currently held by China, I’d only behead murderers and rapists and the like. Now, they have me beheading lads accused of sorcery, drug possession, gay lads, and lads accused of apostasy. I don’t even know what apostasy is, but I know it’s not worth me not being able to feed myself a fucking sandwich with the pain in my shoulder”.

By comparison, the USA, close allies with Saudi government, executed 28 people during 2015, although Ahmed was quick to point out that most of those were conducted by lethal injection.

“Let them come over here and bring a scimitar down on a lad’s neck three times a week, see how their shoulders hold up,” he groused.