The Wound

You spent years holding tools that were not yours. Each fit well enough to deceive for a season. But your grip was always wrong – thumb braced where it should have rested, wrist turned against the grain. The body learnt your lie – said comfortable when it meant familiar. One day, your hand closes around something new. Before thought, your fingers find grooves you didn't know you were searching for. Your wrist settles. And then – from somewhere behind your ribs – a note. As if your body were a string struck at last in the pitch it was made for.

The Path

Joy hasn't landed. Terror has. You have felt certain before. You have sworn oaths to tools that went silent in your hands. Each time, certainty lied. To answer this resonance would mean admitting that the life you built – the calluses, the practice, the identity – was spent forcing harmony with the wrong pitch. So you set it down. Your fingers open slowly. Your palm holds its shape for a moment before emptying. You turn away, back to the familiar – the things with names and histories and the approval of everyone watching. But it does not fade. You wake at night with your chest humming the very pitch you are trying to forget. You fill your days with the sound of your own voice explaining why this life is enough. You wait for the resonance to drown. It waits. Then comes the day your body refuses the dissonance. Not in triumph – in exhaustion. Too tired to lie anymore. You cross the room. You reach for what you set down years ago, still holding the shape of your grip. Your fingers close. The weight settles. And the numbness at the root of your thumb – the one you forgot was a wound – wakes. You look down. A scar. Old. In the shape of this grip. The sound that rises is quieter than you expected. A string you forgot you were, finally permitted to vibrate

The Shadow

The Collector of Almosts hears the note, and his chest answers before he does. The fear of error sounds like wisdom: that every path chosen is every other path now dead. So he does not answer the note. He acquires it. Places the tool on a shelf. Pristine. Promising certainty that never comes. In the centre, a chisel his hand had known before his mind did. He could still feel the grooves when he closed his eyes. Other tools arrive. Each with its own sound, its own promise – and the same cold intervention. He acquires them too. The shelf becomes a wall. The wall becomes an altar. In the first year he says: I will return when I know. In the fifth, knowledge is its own form of devotion. In the twentieth: The one who guards the gate is as sacred as the one who walks through it. He dies in that shrine. The tools outlive him – none worn by use, none taught to sing. Strangers pick them up, answer the notes at last, and never learn the name of the man who kept them waiting. ⧫ The Inheritor heard the note once. Young, before he understood what it would cost. The resonance was unmistakable. So was what it demanded: to disappoint everyone who had already decided what he should carry. His father's adze waited in the corner, the one that smelled of pine and his father's hands. Every morning he wakes to its weight. Every stroke jars bones shaped for a different angle. But he has built religion around the ache, learnt to see his refusal as selfishness. He dies with calluses on the wrong hands. Somewhere, the tool that fit his grip is teaching someone else to sing.

The Cut