The Threshold

You wake with your hand on the wound. The blade is gone; beneath your palm, the flesh still gathers around the hollow it left. Inside it, a pulse beats slower than yours. All day it keeps its darker time – through meals, through speech, through the hours you call your own. Between the beats, it asks: What will you make of me?

The Way

The body screams: Numb the nerve. Stitch it shut before it speaks. You refuse the mercy. You sit in the breach and let the nerve burn. The blade did not slip past your guard. It found the place you never learnt to guard. There you lay your palm. You give it no name to quiet it, no story to soften it. You hold it while it burns. The skin draws tight. The wound loses its mouth; where it opened, a spine rises. The sword asked: Are you weak? The scar answers: I was.

The Shadow

The Unshaken watched his mother go hollow while she was still breathing. After his father left, her silence took the house room by room; last of all, it took her. In that quiet, he swore: not me. Now he stitches every wound shut before the blood can speak. But no body closes clean. Say his father's name and his hand rises to the old place on his neck, where he cut the first cry. Let a room go quiet, and his shoulders fold. First the kitchen: his fork stopped above the plate. Then the hallway: his hand on the banister, no step taken. Last, the bedroom, where even the sheets make no sound. Until, room by room, the silence takes him too. ❖ The Tender learnt young that a wound can change the weight of a room. A half-told story at dinner, a breath cut short – and the table leans towards her. Nobody names the tilt; her body learns its shape all the same. Each morning her fingernails find the seam and tear out what the night stitched. Don't close, she breathes. I'm not done with you. Years pass. At each dinner, she begins the story, catches her breath, and leaves the pause hanging over the table. This time, the pause falls. No one catches it. The wound has been told too often to bleed. She picks the dry seam anyway, with a grief no one stoops to catch. The table has stopped leaning her way.

The Cut