The Wound

Your jaw has the shape of what you won't say. The room is tilted. Others walk the slant as though it were level – pictures hung true on leaning walls, feet at angles no one names. They call it home. You did too, once. The foundations groan. Your body groans back. Plaster dust feathers down like indoor snow. Cracks fine as hair web the ceiling. Somewhere inside the wall, a nail backs itself out – each thread releasing with a thin cry. Your jaw never unclenched.

The Path

The floorboards vibrate beneath your soles. The coming correction rises through your shins. No structure holds a lie forever. The debt collects itself. The question is not if – only how. Your hand aches for the sledgehammer. Level the tilt by levelling everything. The logic is clean. But the hammer does not distinguish – cannot tell which beam leaned and which one held. It swings; the structure falls. And you stand in the wreckage, finally level, finally alone. You could stop looking. Let your body learn the lean until the lean feels like standing. Call the strain endurance. The quieter work is shoring up the beams while the ceiling still sags – tapping each one to hear which still ring, which have rotted, which are merely strained. Some walls must come down before others can stand true. You live in a house under construction: plaster dust and tarps where windows should be. Years pass. The ache has settled into the joints. Your shoulders learn the shape of bracing. Your hands crack and heal and crack. Most days smell of sawdust. Some mornings you notice: the ankle's corrections are smaller now. One day you stumble where the floor is finally level. For one breath, level feels like falling.

The Shadow

Leveling can become violence. Bracing can become worship. The Righteous does not wait. He takes the sledgehammer to the first groan, calling each blow justice. But the hammer cannot tell rotten from sound. He levels the walls that leaned and the walls that held alike. As he stands righteous in the rubble, the debris tastes like purity. He builds again. Same ground. Same hands. The new structure tilts within a year. He stands crooked again. His hand finds the hammer. ❖ The Pious feels the same tremor – and kneels. Her hands find timber before her mind finds thought. She does not brace the wall. She anoints it. Each crack, scripture; each groan, hymn. Her children inherit the slant as liturgy. Their backs curve before they can speak, necks tilting. Generations pass. No one knows the floor was meant to be level. They die shouldering the roof of a tomb their mother called cathedral. The tilt corrected itself regardless.

The Cut