The Wound

The room is tilted. You feel it in your jaw – the clench you can't release – before you see it in the walls. 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 sifts down like slow snow. Cracks fine as hair web the ceiling. Your ankle compensates as your teeth find each other. Somewhere inside the wall, a nail begins to back itself out – each thread releasing with a thin cry. Your jaw tightens.

The Path

You recognise this room in your bones. Now you feel the tremor of the coming correction. 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 leveling everything. The logic is clean. But the hammer doesn't read the structure – cannot tell which beam leaned and which one held. It swings. The structure falls. And you stand in the wreckage, finally level, finally alone. Or you could stop seeing. 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. You learn which beams answer when you tap them – which are rotten, which merely strained. You learn that some walls must come down before others can stand true. You learn to live in a house under construction: plaster dust in your coffee, tarps where windows should be. Years pass. The ache has settled into the joints – quiet, chronic. Most days: sawdust and small failures. Some mornings you notice: the ankle's corrections are smaller now. Then one day you stumble – where the floor is finally level. Your body was still correcting. For one breath, level feels like falling.

The Shadow

Leveling can become violence. And bracing can become worship. The Blind Hammer does not wait. He takes the sledgehammer to the first groan, calling each blow justice. But the hammer doesn't discriminate – cannot tell rotten from sound. He levels the guilty and the innocent together, the walls that leaned and the walls that held. He stands in the rubble, righteous and alone. The silence of the debris tastes like purity. He builds again – on the same ground, with the same hands. The new structure tilts within a year. He hasn't noticed: he stands crooked now. His hand is already reaching for the hammer. ⧫ The Crooked Priest feels the same tremor – and kneels. His hands find timber before his mind finds thought. He does not brace the wall. He anoints it. Each crack, scripture. Each groan, hymn. His children learn the slant as liturgy. Their backs curve before they can speak. Their necks tilt. They teach their children. Generations pass. No one remembers the floor was meant to be level. He dies holding up the roof of a tomb he called a home. One made rubble. One became it. Neither lived to see the floor find level. The tilt corrected itself without them.

The Cut