The Threshold

You thrash. Your fingers catch wreckage – planks, broken spars, anything that floats – and you haul yourself up. The air bites, the raft drifts, and the shore refuses to arrive. Beneath you, the dark has no floor.

The Way

You grip harder until the wood betrays you. You sink. Water fills your mouth, your eyes; the dark loses its edges, and there is no bottom, there has never been a bottom— Your knee strikes stone. The shock. The indignity. A lifetime lashed to wreckage, and the water barely caresses your knees. Your legs tremble, strangers to a weight that was always theirs. Shame floods you. Let it. You are standing. The ground does not care how long it took.

The Shadow

The wood shifts beneath him. His fingers whiten on the planks, locked there so long the knuckles have forgotten any other shape. The Steadfast touched bottom once, years ago, in calmer water. His foot found stone, and for one breath he felt his full weight with nothing to distribute it – the whole of himself pressing into the earth, almost bearable. His knees buckled. His spine groaned under a weight he hadn't known he carried. Before the next breath, he kicked off the stone and swore never to sink again. Now he builds his life on the raft – lashing every plank tighter, mending what rots, clinging to wreckage he will not leave. He dies on the wood. Lungs full of air. His feet hang a handspan from the stone. ❖ The Tireless touched bottom once. The moment her feet found stone, silence became a roar – her own pulse, deafening in the stillness. Beneath it, something worse: herself, whole and unbearable – for one breath, almost bearable. She never stopped thrashing. Not toward a shore – away from the stillness. Driftwood strikes her shoulders; she ignores it. To cling is to pause. To pause is to hear herself. Her arms lock into a rhythm that leads nowhere, whipping the surface to foam. She drowns in the pauses between her strokes.

The Cut