The Threshold

You lifted the shard off the floor, your blood still on it. Proof. At first, you held it because you had to remember. Then because forgetting felt like betrayal. Years passed. The wound closed badly. By the time you noticed, the hand had forgotten how to open. Skin had grown over glass. One morning you woke with your palm fused to the thing you swore you were only carrying: no longer holding it, but held by it. Now you meet the world knuckles-first. Some nights the glass wakes under the skin, as though it still remembers your blood.

The Way

Your fist: knuckles white, skin stretched thin where it healed over glass. Blood still warm beneath it, feeding a memory that went cold years ago. They cut you once. Every morning since, the glass has been your own. Unclench, and the skin must tear where it healed over glass. Keep the fist closed, and you finish their work for them: dying with your hand locked around a shard they have long since forgotten. Your fingers open one by one. You flinch each time. The hand remembers the cut, even when the glass is no longer cutting. The shard falls. A small, clean sound on the floor. For the first time in years, it is not in your hand. Air finds the wound. Cold. Then warm. Then nothing but the world.

The Shadow

The Serene learnt to hide the fist inside an open palm. She pushes the shard deeper, beneath feeling, and builds her life on top. I have healed, she tells herself. I have let go. She smiles and shows an open palm. Beneath it, the fist. She marries. Raises children. Builds a home around the closed hand. Meals are made. Clothes are folded. Foreheads are kissed goodnight. No one comes near the palm. The wound returns anyway. It becomes rage she will not name. Her children learn which days her eyes turn to glass. Their spines memorise the silence that means not today. Her smile never changes – so they learn to read what waits behind it, and then, one day, they stop reading her face at all. Clearing out the house decades later, her children find no photographs of open arms. Only the shard on the nightstand, still nested in the exact hollow of a fist that never uncurled. ❖ The Resolute wakes each morning with his fist already raised. His proof. In every conversation the hand rises; in every silence, the wound raises it for him. He finds others with glass under the skin. They know the angle of the hand, the quick defence, the old shine in the eyes. Soon the wounds are in the light, depth measured against depth. An open hand unsettles them. A shard on the floor looks like betrayal. Some nights the fist feels like a prison. He presses his ear to the knuckles and listens for whoever is in there. No one answers. At dinner, the fist rises again. His wife stops speaking. Across the table, his son's hand closes around his glass, knuckles white. No one asks what the fist is proving anymore.

The Cut